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Real Competition Can Stop Health Insurance Gouging
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama is all for the congressional effort to produce health-care reform — as long as the legislation we end up with doesn't contain any actual reform.
Indeed, the senator gets fainting spells at the mere mention of Barack Obama's proposed reforms, gasping that they add up to socialized health care. He recently stammered that the president's plan would destroy "the best health care system the world has ever known."
Huh? This guy puts the "dumb" in dumbfounding. Maybe by "finest" he meant the most expensive, for it surely is that. But the best? Hardly. The quality of our care ranks 37th in the world — only one notch better than Slovenia!
But perhaps it's not Shelby's fault that he's so out of touch with the unpleasant reality that most Americans face when they're sick and have to cope with the costly, bureaucratic, uncaring system now run by a handful of insurance corporations. After all, he's been in Congress for 30 years, so he and his family have long been receiving platinum-level coverage courtesy of us taxpayers. Maybe he assumes everyone gets the same. You see, since Shelby already gets excellent socialized health care, of course he thinks it's the finest.
Obama's proposed reform is not so bold as to offer you and me the same sweet deal that our congress-critters get, but it does include one provision to help us escape the untender mercies of insurance profiteers. Called the "public option," it creates a publicly run insurance plan as an alternative to the costly, mingy, inscrutable policies shoved at us by the big, monopolistic insurers.
The beauty of this option is that it gives everyone a real choice. Since the public insurance plan doesn't rake off a profit, doesn't need a massive marketing budget, won't pay multimillion-dollar executive salaries and won't have an army of backroom agents working to deny payment for treatments our doctors prescribe, it will offer better coverage at a cheaper price than the pampered private corporations presently offer.
This public policy would provide a competitive balance on the price and quality of coverage available to us consumers.
The choice is up to us, for the public option is — after all — optional. If you're happy to have an insurance corporation be your health-care broker, go with that. If not, you can consider purchasing the public policy.This makes so much sense that the insurers, drug makers, hospitals, nursing homes and other big players in the health-care industry carefully pondered how the public option would be so beneficial to the people — then, in unison, the industry issued its measured response: "Shhrrriiieeekkk! Nooooooooo!! Yikes-Yikes-Yikes!!!"
Insurance executives have largely divvied up the national health-insurance market so they've been able to avoid competing against each other (the American Medical Association's 2008 study of health insurance markets in 314 U.S. cities found that 94 percent of them are "highly concentrated"). So they are apoplectic at the prospect of having a genuine price-and-quality competitor in every U.S. market.
Thus, the industry is going all-out to kill the public option — not by defeating it in the marketplace, but by unleashing its army of Washington lobbyists to get Congress to kill it. Instead of bullets, they're firing millions of dollars in campaign donations at our lawmakers. The question is whether the industry's political cash and lobbying clout will induce enough senators and representatives to vote against the American people — 72 percent of whom tell pollsters they want the public option included in the reform package.
To learn more and to support real consumer choice in health insurance, contact: democracyforamerica.com.
- Posted in
23 Comments so far
Show All"The question is whether the industry's political cash and lobbying clout will induce enough senators and representatives to vote against the American people . . . ."
This is a question?
When has industry lobbying ever failed to "induce" our Senators and Congressmen to vote against the interests of the American people?
q
The only reason the "polls" show only 72% support for the public option is that the polls depict the public option as government-run hospitals, doctors offices, etc.
If the pollsters asked more objective questions, more than 72% of Americans would support a public option.
Pollsters questions regarding single-payer are even more slanted, resulting in even more skewed poll results for single-payer.
The New York Times poll that showed 72 percent support for a public option asked people if they would support a public plan that is "like Medicare." But the proposed public plan is totally UNlike Medicare, so the poll does not apply to the Dems' crappy bill
Maybe congress should lose their health insurance the way hundreds of thousands of American Workers have lost theirs? It's time our congress begins to feel the pain of their constituents.
You know, I wonder if it's possible to find out how much the taxpayers are paying for the health care of our Congresspersons. It should be possible through the Freedom of Information Act (?). Then a llst could be kept of how much each politician and his family members are getting and made public.
Just an idea for all you investigative jounalists out there. Expose the hypocrisy!
Great idea. We do deserve to know how much we pay our Congress critters to bully us the way they have been doing for years. They must be paying the journalists a lot of hush money.
Loose their excellent coverage? Even if we fire their incompetent asses, they (families included) will keep their policies for life.
Mr. Hightower:
Here's the problem with the public option. There's two versions. The first one conceived by Jacob Hacker assumed a robust plan with about 129 million Americans pre enrolled. It would slightly reduce insurance costs. Slightly. But many of the problems in the system would remain. Two big ones: insurance tied to an employer; we have to end that. And profit making on people's health; that has to go.
And there are many other problems with the Hacker plan: co pays, deductibles, denials of service, losing your entire financial solvency due to underinsurance...all of that would remain, plus the bureaucratic burden of adding another insurer to the list that hospitals and doctors have to deal with.
However, Congress didn't even adopt this "robust", or elephantine version in their draft legislation. No, they went for the mouse version: only 10 million people can join and the government has to spend all kinds of money on bureaucracy to go find them and sign them up. No savings. No real reform.
I'm a bit surprised that Jim Hightower would recommend a "public option" without at least touching upon its "Trojan Horse" aspects.
As weacguy correctly notes, even the most robust "public option" has a few gnarly strings attached to it.
And Congress isn't even CLOSE to a "Jacob Hacker"-type public option; it's busy creating more of a JIM Hacker* public option.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister
· Yr Obd't Servant
"This public policy would provide a competitive balance on the price and quality of coverage available to us consumers."
Wanna bet? You've obviously bought into the propaganda about how USA Incorporated's business and governmental elements actually work to produce "freedom and democracy" and all that other good stuff.
The elimination of what you call "real competition" is a primary objective of what is euphemistcally referred to as "free" markets, "free" trade and "free" enterprise where "free" actually means unfettered and unbound by any rules save and except the singular fiduciary responsibilty for maximizing corporate profits.
You can be absolutely certain that any so-called "public option" that ultimately emerges from the "greatest democracy on earth" will be designed to present no competetive threat whatever to its paid sponsors. To the contrary, it's much more likely to increase private profits by some kind of reverse cherry picking and socialization of high-end costs.
As of now you can forget the public option. First, the ruling Corporations are not going to allow more than about a 10% initial discount from private plans for any "public option" plan. Second, the public option plan will quickly load up with the sickest and those who have been going without insurance for years and years and need some care immediately, which will swamp the plan, meaning that long waiting lists and huge deficits will quickly develop. Third, right now the whole hopeless thing of tinkering with a failed system instead of going with single payer is so twisted and lame that essentially nothing can pass.
IMO, Jim Hightower does not understand the "public option". He isn't the first one.
To raydelcamino...the Pollsters don't even ask about Single-Payer, because it is "off the table."
I agree that poll results are skewed. If pollsters don't ask the right questions, they cannot possibly get the right answers. Pollsters have NO idea how many Americans want Single-Payer and are afraid to ask.
HR 676 is now an amendment to HR 3200. Thank goodness!
Hightower seems increasingly to just be filling his assigned faux-left niche in the PR machine.
Indeed.
With that little signature-folksy straw hat, & populist words.
Nice branding --and profits.
In the end, more of the same--support for the Suits.
Z-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Hightower sez: "... since (Sen.) Shelby already gets excellent socialized health care, of course he thinks it's the finest."
***
This hypocrisy from the "Socialism!" town criers needs to be hammered home.
Every aspect of their lives is billed to the U.S.Inc. worker. Including the vig they skim from lobbyists representing corporations which write the laws that allow them to delve ever deeper into the citizenry's pockets.
It's funny how, to the wing-nutz, that spending $550+bn a year (defense budget) to kill people seems reasonable -- but to spend any money to (yikes!) keep us healthy is absurd.
That someone can bitch that they had to pay for me getting stitches to keep from, perhaps, bleeding to death just seems cruel & inhumane. Wow "cruel & inhumane"; aren't there laws against that?
Like so many issues, the problem isn't facts, figures, plans, blah blah blah. It's words. No matter how skillfully you say it, the word "socialism" by definition is bad in the US. Doesn't matter that Congress' healthcare is socialism, or police, fire dept, etc.
The issue needs to be rebranded - "Let's give Americans the Golden Insurance Plan those fat cats in Congress get!!" I guarantee, not a single Rightie would object! Heck, they'd be proud to put those elitist fat cats in their place!
Single-payer works and has worked for almost two generations. It works in the UK, Norway, Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Taiwan, Australia, and Denmark.
Nowhere that single-payer has ever been tried has it either been repealed or even seriously considered for such a fate. It's the same for the limited single-payer systems we now have in the US for the elderly (medicare), the seriously poor (medicaid) and veterens (the VA).
Just on the basis of that evidence and how sorry and over-priced the US healthcare system is, single payer ought to be tried.
Poet
No question about it. I'm very surprised that Jim favors this ill concieved piece of garbage.
The real irony of Hightower's support for a "public option" is its suggestion that it would create "real competition" and all of its consequential benefits. That's a very strong condemnation of the entire capitalist theory and concept if you accept the premise and think about it carefully.
Wasn't "real competition" supposed to be the primary advantage provided by unfettered capitalist "free enterprise" itself operating through the "magic of the marketplace" alone? And if not, exactly what public benefit does it provide to anyone other than its own profiteers?
WHAT ?!?!? Either I'm losing my reading skills or Jim Hightower is falling for the public option. Where is his take on single payer? Please don't tell me he's giving up too ! :=(
I read the comments from oldest to newest, and when I posted a reply to an early comment upthread, I wondered if I'd be the only one who thought Hightower's critical insight fell surprisingly flat here. Then I kept reading...
To dip into the self-help lexicon, I feel "validated" after finding that I'm not the only disappointed reader.
Hightower is at least sipping the Kool-Aid on this one.
· Yr Obd't Servant
The salaries and benefits of our elected federal officials should be limited to a median national income-equivalent of the same. At least until the national median income public determines by federal referendum that their government officials deserve more.
The US Constitution didn't include features like this (i.e., provisions for direct federal referenda), no doubt because its framers assumed that, if nothing else, the 2 yr election terms of House members would always in the end make such features unnecessary; that the House would always remain close enough to the public sentiment; and that that public sentiment, itself, would always be sufficiently rational and pro-active in electing House members to obviate the need for further 'checks and balances' beyond what were already provided-for.
The Framers weren't necessarily wrong about all this -- at the time.
But the better of them, the more democratic of them, if they were alive today, would have to admit that their faith in The Rescuing Virtues of Human Nature, as enworlded in their Document, was altogether too optimistic.