EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Congress, Obama Missed Key Opportunity to Reform Health Care
They had a chance and they didn't take it.
The $787 billion stimulus package President Barack Obama signed last week gave Congress and the administration the chance to take a small step toward rebuilding a health care system that is illogical, inefficient and inhumane.
Instead, Republicans cried socialism, Democrats buckled and Obama surrendered.
Staying healthy has always been a crapshoot in the United States. There is nothing new about illness and disease visiting victims with a cruel randomness. The woman who has never smoked develops lung cancer. Her next-door neighbor, a former smoker, does not. Children come down with rare and mysterious ailments that leave us all heartbroken.
But increasingly, getting healthy again or preventing the diseases that can be prevented have developed their own cruel randomness. In the end, the final stimulus package only underscores how arbitrary our health care system has become.
Initially House Democrats proposed temporarily extending Medicaid to those who lose their jobs in this horrendous economic downturn. The bill also called for helping the unemployed extend their employer-sponsored health insurance through COBRA, provided they had that insurance when they were laid off.
The final bill dropped the provision to extend Medicaid to workers whose employers didn't provide health benefits in the first place. It kept the subsidy for COBRA, but also set up a potentially life-or-death lottery in which those who lost their jobs before Sept. 1 get no COBRA help while those who lost their jobs on or after Sept. 1 will have part of their health insurance bill paid by the government for nine months.
Why Sept. 1? Who knows? This stuff doesn't have to make sense.
Does it make sense to tie access to decent health care to the ability to land a decent job? What was the thinking on killing the Medicaid extension? No need to help the unemployed who didn't have health coverage in the first place because, hey, they're used to it?
Of course the original proposal was far from perfect. Nothing is easy, or cheap, when it comes to health care coverage. But as I argued in a recent column, the initial plan was a move in the right direction - the direction of universal, government-sponsored health care.
And the Medicaid proposal was temporary, which means it was a chance to try something new on a small scale to see how it worked.
The idea of government-sponsored health care scares conservatives to death. A few responded to my column with howls of protest. The general themes? Government doesn't get anything right. Universal health care will lead to the rich getting the help they need by paying out of pocket. The poor will suffer long delays for needed care. Government bureaucrats will interfere with health decisions.
As I wrote back to one such reader: The description sounds pretty much like the system we have today - although it's insurance companies that can't get anything right, and it's their bureaucrats interfering with medical treatment.
There can be no doubt that our current system is unworkable. About 45 million Americans are uninsured. The number in Silicon Valley is growing, according to the 2009 Index of Silicon Valley, issued by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. So is the number of valley residents buying their own policies, the index says.
Premiums for private insurance can easily reach $1,000 or more a month. It's a crushing cost for some who are working and simply out of reach for most who aren't. The stimulus bill gave the nation's leaders a rare chance to do something about that. And they failed.
They'll have to live with that - while the rest of us live with the consequences.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
13 Comments so far
Show AllIn another article it was reported that the US Now spends 17.2 percent GDP on health care, this number growing at a faster rate then virtualy every other country.
Added to that various drug Companies have increased the price of their drugs by as much as 100%.
If a drug has been on the market for several years what factors could suddenly see the costs to produce said drug escalate by that amount?
I simply can not see any . The Drug plan intorduced by the Bush Administration is very likely helping to see an increase in Drug prices. Those companies realize that where a consumer may not have been able to afford that higher price for Drugs, the Government can.
This should serve as a signal as to what will happen under Obama's plan for Health Care reform. It suggested that prices will fall as the market "competes" for those 47 million Americans without health insurance.
This might well happen in the first few years but once they are hooked and the Government starts to step in to pay on the behalf of American consumers who cannot afford these plans, they will ratchet up prices.
"Those companies realize that where a consumer may not have been able to afford that higher price for Drugs, the Government can."
With Obama's plan, it's like the parent finding out their kid is giving all their lunch money to the school bully. But instead of the parent becoming outraged and teaching the kid how to stand up to bullies--instead they just "buckle" and double the kid's lunch money. And pretty soon the bully is getting that too.
Like the parent in this example, sooner or later the O'Dems will have to face the fact that when it comes to the corruption of for-profit healthcare there is a principle involved that cannot be avoided.
Why not use, Ravi Batra's prescription for solving our health care woes?
"Phase out and eventually abolish the private health insurance system, and organize it along the lines of the Social Security Administration(SSA)"
"The SSA should create a new department of health security administration(HSA)to handle payments to health-care providers." Here's how the proposed system would work. The employers and employees will deposit the medical premiums, which are currently in vogue, with the HSA rather than private insurance companies. The HSA in turn will pay doctors, hospitals, and other health-care providers for the treatment of patients," "It will replace the functions of myriad insurance companies that now offer the same services with fat paychecks to their executives." "Thus the same care and medical benefits will be provided at a fraction of the administrative cost." "There will be a single health-care manager, the health security manager, the Health Security Administration as part of the SSA." "Just imagine the cost savings arising from this arrangement."
"Single payer universal health-care costs would be lower than the current U.S. system due to lower administration cost." "The United States spends 50-100 percent on administration than single payer systems." By lowering these administration costs the United States would have the ability to provide universal health care, without managed care,increase benefits and still save money...Federal studies by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office show that single payer universal health care would save 100 to 200 billion dollars per year despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits."
The President and both the house and Senate are privy to this information, so why are they not pursuing universal single payer health care? In my opinion they care more about the money they get from the "health-care industries' lobbyists, and they care nothing about we the people that can not afford private health insurance, or have lost their insurance. They are content to let us suffer, and die and eat cake, as they enjoy their campaign contributions.
Did anyone ever hear of single-payer health care? It's used by every advanced country
but ours. It's h.r.676. As yet, hasn't even had a hearing. Disgrace.
I think this Bloomberg.com article gives a little clearer picture into what Obama's idea of healthcare might be.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs
In East Tennessee, horrifying health care = their acceptable standards of health care, plus they are allowed to run slick misleading ads to make us believe they are so caring. http://www.wisecountyissues.com Profit care comes ahead of patient care in Tennessee !
You asked, "What was the thinking on killing the Medicaid extension?" Where's the political pay check in that? The money went to COBRA extensions and subsidies as a welfare payment to the insurance companies.
I canceled my policy today. It had gone from $96 to $163 per month over just a few years time and I knew there was no way I could afford the next increase. To get that coverage, I had a $7200 a year deductible, after which they might pay perhaps up to 80% of an expense if they felt like it.
Obama care ain't gonna help me. Democrats are delusional thinking that increasing the corporate welfare in this will somehow, someday, someway turn into universal care.
If Obama wanted to make a start on making healthcare affordable, he'd start with the CORRUPTION. Medical care is a gravy train. It's quite similar to the Wall St. crisis with its congressional complicity.
"If Obama wanted to make a start on making healthcare affordable, he'd start with the CORRUPTION. Medical care is a gravy train. It's quite similar to the Wall St. crisis with its congressional complicity."
So far the O'Dems don't call it "corruption" but prefer the term market "competition."
I think the Dems plan is to make everyone buy health insurance, no matter if it is affordable or what the deductable is, and thats good news for the insurance companies. Come to think of it, don't we own 79.9% of AIG (or have the option to own it), so insurance premiums will in effect be just another tax.
So don't hold your breath waiting for a universal health care plane, the neo-malthusians are in control, and those who can not afford health care die earlier and consume less resources which is a good thing to them (less social security recipients as well). Europe is being attacked economically at the moment as well with the Basel II accords crippling banks and credit. This will force them to give up their social welfare. Canada's universal healthcare is on the ropes as well.
The future of Globalization is survival of the fittest, if you can't afford it, you are expendable. As Stalin said, "if you don't work, you don't eat". Today, even if you do work, and can eat, you might not be able to get affordable health care, and then after some time you won't need to work or eat.
Gee, maybe when we get a Dem majority.
Nah, they purposely ditched it all. They're too busy giving higher priority to more war spending and tax cuts for the wealthy.
Well, sorry to mention this --but-- people didn't pick Obama because he pledged "come hell or highwater, American's will get a healthcare plan!"
Sadly, that's not the case. There is no case; no decree. It's all just a disgrace. Egg on the face. No place to run up the flag of discontent because you can't hold them to it. The vote went through and erased the small advantage we all held. Too many willing to sell the farm for nothing but rhetoric.
No eggs with toast this week. Better hope the cow still milks.