Health Care Reform?

2013. No significant cost containment. 10 million still uninsured after 10 years. Tax increase. Growing deficit. And that's not all.

As we've been trying to point out in previous posts, the piece meal approach to reforming Health Care in America may be doomed to failure. Not failure in Congress. Failure in the marketplace. Failure in providing affordable accessible high quality health care for all.

And even worse than the inadequacies of the legislation are the outrageous lies and fearmongering by the Republican opponents, funded and scripted, we suspect, by the health insurance industry.

Where do we start? How about inadequacies of the legislation.

The reform we're likely to see won't provide the public option coverage until 2013. It isn't going to help us, and others with pre-existing conditions and no employer-provided plan, for four years. Guess we'll just have to rely on prayer and luck. Various analysists tell me that's because of the way the Congressional Budget Office calculates things. Let me quote Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:

"The slow start is a way of holding down costs in the 10-year budget window. If the bill begins in 2010, but the subsidies don't kick in until 2013, then that's three years that are under the budget but aren't costing much money. That means the new health-care system can really cost an average of $140 billion each year, as opposed to $100 billion, and that means you can afford a better system. "

Does that make sense to you? All we get from that is this is another political machination with disregard to the impact it will have on the people. We'll pretend to be providing for the people for 10 years for $1trillion, but we'll only really provide it for 7 years for $1trillion, so the amount we can spend each year we actually DO this can go from the stated "average annual cost" of $100billion to $140billion and we can do more with it. Except for the three years we do nothing for people.

Mandated coverage. How can we be forced to get an insurance plan when there's nobody out there right now that will give us a plan we can afford, thanks to pre-existing conditions and age? The public option might help here, but it won't be available for four more years! And when it is, it will be subsidized on a sliding scale. Those of us with middle-class incomes will get screwed again.

Premium costs. Are we reading this correctly? Insurance companies have to take everyone who applies, but they can "adjust" their premiums. They can charge older people twice as much as younger people. If nothing is done to reduce the premiums currently charged, that could mean your adult offspring in their 30s pay $400 per month for insurance, and you in your 50s could pay $800 for the same monthly plan. How is this reform?

Can't these legislators see that all they have to do is take an eraser to the Medicare legislation and eliminate the 65 year age barrier -- make it accessible to everyone -- and we get the reform we need as soon as the President signs it . (OK, we'll give them a few months to hire more people - possibly the insurance company employees who would be out of work, and add more computers, so they can process the billing.)

A single-payer system would save billions of dollars without reducing the quality or accessibility of the care we receive -- arguably, those aspects would actually improve. That's money we, the people, won't have to spend on health care. Same providers, same services, just a different payment system.

What's so scary about this concept?

We'll look at the lies we're hearing in our next post on this. Here's a taste:

*The government will ration health care (like the insurance companies don't now?).

*We'll die standing in line waiting for health care just like in Canada (Are you kidding me? They actually SAY that!).

*Taxes will go up on everyone to pay for this (they may have something there if we don't do more to contain costs).

*Americans are getting cold feet about health care reform (that's completely dependent on who you ask, Dems or Repubs).

Jacque