Selling out Grandma

Holy crap!

Can’t people understand that we are already paying more than we should be for health care? The proposed new All-American Plan – as envisioned by our President and many other concerned, caring Americans – isn’t going to cost us any more than we are now paying. It might even cost less. And we’ll get more freedom to choose. More freedom, more choice, more caring. Am I dreaming? Consider …

Cutting overhead from 30% to 3%
Getting it right the first time instead of testing over and over again.
Cutting out the middleman
Negotiating reasonable fees with providers and drug companies
The fundamental principle is keeping all of us healthy, making us well

This is the dream our President has for us. And we can achieve it.

Health care will never be cheap in America. We want the best, and we want access to it at OUR choosing. We want to be responsible for our own choices. But it doesn’t have to cost 16% of our gross domestic product!

Where will we find the money? In our pockets, the same place we do now. And we won’t need any more than we already spend. It will just flow in a different pattern, and encompass all of us.

Our current system amounts to what George Lakoff calls “Private Taxation.” How’s that?

“Insurance companies have the power to tax and they tax the public mightily. When 20 percent to 30 percent of payments do not go to health care, but to denying care and profiting from it, that constitutes a tax on the 96 percent of voters that have health care. But the tax does not go to benefit those who are taxed; it benefits managers and investors. And the people taxed have no representation. Insurance company health care is a huge example of taxation without representation. And you can't vote out the people who have taxed you. The American Plan offers an alternative to private taxation”.

Let’s face it. Everybody needs to access health care in this country. But we pay through the nose for it. Break down where the money comes from now:

1. Insured with individual policies – we pay high, high premiums with high deductibles
2. Insured through employers – back breaking premiums (especially small business), lower pay checks to pay for it
3. Medicare/Medicaid – taxpayers like us already pay
4. Uninsured – providers just hike costs on everyone else to make up for those who can’t pay, and often the patient waits too long because they know they can’t afford it, so they need way more services than if they’d gone to a doctor or clinic at the first sign of the problem, costing even more, which we pay through higher premiums on everyone else
5. Self-insured – pay cash, at much higher prices for services than the insurance companies negotiate (these patients also tend to wait too long to get help because of the cost)
6. Pension coverage – my car costs more so GM can pay benefits to workers who accepted lower wages for years to fund their pension plans and retirement benefits. Now that health care costs have escalated so much GM can’t pay it anymore, they went bankrupt, and my taxes and “cash for clunkers” had to bail them out (George Lakoff suggests we should have made the insurance industry fork over a big chunk of the bail out money since they had a lot of responsibility for it.)

Add up all this money and you’ll find plenty enough to pay for the American Plan of President Obama’s dream. We just have to collect it in one place and apply the principles outlined at the beginning of this article.

Are you worried that a single entity for billing and paying would mean a government takeover of health care? That some government bureaucrat will come between you and your doctor? Rubbish! The American Plan would mean LESS interference than we put up with now. Lakoff again:

“Insurance Companies Govern Your Lives. They have more power over you than even governments have. They make life and death decisions. And they are accountable only to profit, not to citizens.”

“Your pain, their gain” (quoting an anonymous blogger).

With the ideal new American Plan, with a single billing and paying agency, we could achieve all those savings we mentioned earlier, almost immediately. We’d end up paying less for more. Choices would increase dramatically, because no provider would be “out of network”. But even if we do this in baby steps, beginning with providing an American Plan to supplement the existing private plans, we’ll start seeing some savings right away.

Legislators who refuse to even consider trying to use ideas that have worked quite well in other countries just show they care more about their campaign contributors than the health of their constituents. They’re selling out Grandma.

JM