The speech President Obama delivered last night was a long time coming. Personally, I was sick of the "town-hall" debates over health insurance this summer that featured most prominently exagerrated misconceptions and mudslinging rather than policy details. I also believe that it was about time the administration made their platform on healthcare clear, which was successfully done before the very representatives who need to put all the pieces together in Congress.
Health insurance reform needs to be reframed from the perspective that the rich will be paying for the poor and lazy to see doctors, to the understanding that it benefits every American for every American to be insured from the start. By alleviating the uninsured with affordable and accessible plans for coverage, those that already have health insurance reduce the amount of money they pay each year to cover other people's uninsured emergency room visits and treatment.
But the insurance companies also have to be reined in. Everyday, hardworking citizens are denied access to necessary medical attention because insurance companies can cast those with chronic illness or disease aside as economic liabilities instead of recognizing the need for critical care and fulfilling it. As a system driven only by cost/benefits, that is a profitable practice, but doesn't exactly serve the American public the way we deserve. At the other end of the equation, doctors and hospitals, advocacy groups and drug companies have shown willingness to work for a more effective and compassionate reality.
Now, as left-wing as I may be, I don't think that the solution is a singular government-sponsored, socialist system. American principles dictate exactly the opposite, in favor of capitalism and market competition. But the addition of a government-sponsored option in the health insurance industry would stimulate the capitalism in that arena, leading to competitive pricing with higher quality options made more affordable. Insurance will become available to those currently without it, and insurance companies will gain millions of new customers. Capitalism at work, benefitting the public.
For people that can't afford any of the options that open up, a tax credit will be available. This is not a new mechanism in the American government. For example, if a family cannot afford food, they receive food stamps; if they are not making enough money to pay for housing, subsidized housing and welfare are available. As Nate Silver describes in this article, areas with high poverty rates have more support for the public option, whether they support Republicans or Democrats. I think this relationship demonstrates that the insurance debate is no longer just about party politics.
What's great is that if an American wants to keep the insurance they already have, they can. This plan requires no change for those that don't want it; the bill Obama proposes will actually improve the insurance coverage of those who don't want to change theirs by making it illegal for insurance companies to decrease or drop coverage of people with preexisting illness or whose condition worsens. Preventative procedures will also be covered by law, which means that less money can be spent on conditions as they are caught earlier.
To pay for the reforms proposed, money previously wasted in subsidies and fraud within insurance companies will be used. By increasing the effectiveness of Medicare and Medicaid, additional funds will be available to foot the bill. And by requiring that every American have insurance, those that currently are able to pay but choose not to will be supporting the system.
As Obama said last night, "it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn't, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch." The points he described all tend to stabilize a healthcare system that has, in the past, been unpredictable and unstable. Individual health is variable and uncertain; the ability to pay for medical attention shouldn't be.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
well put :) :) although I do not understand why a single-payer system is against capitalism. Perhaps single payer is a recognition of a failure of free markets; a failure that demands government action to fix. What Obama is trying to do now is just that, trying to fix market failures. So why not just have a comprehensive overhaul. I disagree with our president that we can't start from scratch. Sure it makes sense to improve on what works and scrap what doesn't. However, seems to me that private insurance simply doesnt work. Its based on profit motive as you suggest in your piece. If we all agree that health should not be based on profit then why have a private system at all?
I wonder, though, if some people would support a system that wasn't profit-driven. So much of our economy neglects human welfare otherwise, that looking at health insurance in more emotional or compassion-based terms might be too foreign an idea to introduce at the moment. I don't think the U.S. is ready for that, as much as you and I might be, haha.
Liked the piece, especially the referenced article. I would point out that although Silver's article moves in the right direction, it is very difficult to use 6 plot points to generalize a trend over 435 districts and his national data from his "most reasonable" polls are over a month old (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/08/how-to-poll-on-public-option.html). I still personally do not understand all the different options proposed, but I would like to ask a question about the illegal alien situation. Despite Wilson's crass, the question of a public option paying for illegal aliens is something to consider. Although the bill forbids it, there is no enforcement mechanism in place to prevent illegal aliens form benefiting (http://factcheck.org/2009/09/obamas-health-care-speech/ ; don't know the reliablility of this site). Health care providers try to do the right thing, cause no harm, and help those they can. So the ethics of the profession and system require care for all. Does this then point to immigration reform as a reasonable stepping stone to prevent taxpayer spending for illegals since the health care providers can't be asked to deny care?
I would be surprised if the administration tackled immigration reform in conjunction with health insurance reform. It would be nice to have the answer be more than just, "illegal immigrants will not be covered," because the next question is "how?" And aren't illegal immigrants already part of the problem, since I'm assuming that they cannot have health insurance currently, and thereby increase the cost of insurance to those already covered? Good questions. I'll poke around for answers.
Preliminary research leads me to find that the Democrats are kind of dodging this issue entirely by refusing to include verification requirements for citizens to obtain the mandatory insurance of the proposed plan, but also not addressing head-on how illegal immigrants will not be able to find loopholes, ie emergency rooms.
I might be in favor of a public option as long as a constitutional amendment is passed that ensures that no tax money could be used to fund this new government healthcare solution. If this could be guaranteed I would be fine with this solution because the government plan would eventually go out of business because government run businesses normally can’t compete without the power of the American tax payer i.e. the Post Office and Amtrak. The problem is that if government runs a plan in which the goal is to provide the best healthcare for people who wouldn’t otherwise qualify and make money through cost cutting they won’t be able to do it. There is an inherent contradiction in there. The fear on the Republican side of the isle is that the American tax payers will own another business that loses money. They don’t want to risk it.
I understand that changes to healthcare need to be made but there is a better and far easier way. If the major problem is that people get dropped when they shouldn’t and certain preexisting conditions can’t be factored into the underwriting we could do just that. As a country we can choose which preexisting conditions insurance companies can ask about. HIV/ AIDS cases have special stipulations that go along with the conditions on insurance because the law treats them differently. If we said conditions from obesity should not be exempt since they are caused by human actions that makes sense to me. And smokers could be charged for lung cancer but prostate and breast cancer preexisting conditions cannot be asked about and if they are the individual could sue the company. The market could figure out a way to best handle these additional costs. I think that handling individual problems one at a time is a better fundamental solution to the pre-existing conditions problem.
Post a Comment