Don't Do It

No. We cannot afford to have a health care reform bill that is merely lip service.

Literally. We can’t afford it.

Senators, congressmen, please vote down any bill that doesn’t have, at the very least, a fully operational public option, not a trigger option, not a co-op. Though we are completely convinced that reform is essential to a healthy future for our country, both people and economy, we also understand that the “reforms” that mandate individuals to purchase an insurance policy from the private industry, without significant cost control mechanisms, is a recipe for disaster.

Follow my logic. The Finance Committee’s bill offers a bunch of “reforms” but no constraints on profits, and no publicly run insurance option.

Eliminating “pre-existing conditions” is a moral imperative. But without removing the “rating” – inflated premiums – that are charged, the cost of such insurance will be out of reach of most of the 47 million currently uninsured. (We personally would have to pay more than $2000 per month right now, even if they exclude coverage for our pre-existing conditions.)

That would lead to subsidies by the federal government (or, as some amendments propose, state governments) to try to make it affordable. Tax dollars. That would go directly to private insurance companies, who are at record profit levels today.

The Baucus plan doesn’t require employers to provide insurance, and it would fine anyone who doesn’t purchase a private plan. The latest number we saw is $1,500 a year. What would they get for that? Nothing. (Oh, that’s right – charity, or the opportunity to sell everything they own, spend it on treatment, then sign up for a government program like Medicaid - this advice from those bleeding heart Republicans.)

And who would get the $1,500? The government, so they can forward it to the private insurance companies, to help them pay for covering all those sick people with pre-existing conditions.

Despite the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates that this bill will reduce the deficit, it will surely lead to continuing escalation in the cost of insurance for individuals.

Whose costs are we trying to reduce? The individuals? The taxpayers? Aren’t they the same people? Ah, there’s the rub. Corporations are taxpayers, too. They’re also currently footing the bill for most American’s health insurance premiums.

Without a serious mechanism to contain the amount of money we pay to health care service providers, and cut back the overhead of insurance companies (currently at more than 25%, compared to Medicare at 3%), the number of dollars spent on “health care” will climb. If individuals and employers have to keep up with increasing premiums (or pay fines), and co-pays go up, out-of-pocket maximums go up, we will be paying out more than the current 1/6th of our GDP. It may not build up the government’s deficit, but it will surely build up personal deficit for each of us individually.

So how you do you contain costs? How do you do it at home? Discipline. Efficiency. Practicality. Shopping around.

The current system, and the “reformed” system without a public option, doesn’t encourage these things. When the cost of an ultrasound goes up, insurance companies just charge more for premiums, and deny any claims they can get away with. Those of us with “good” health insurance plans don’t see or appreciate the actual costs of the care they receive. As Senator Schumer pointed out recently, if a doctor says ‘Hmmm, I don’t think it’s really necessary, but I suppose we could do a CT scan’, neither the patient nor the doctor has a second thought about what it costs because they don’t pay it directly. So unnecessary tests are done, and the overall cost goes up.

Medicare, the only “public option” in existence right now, uses all those cost containment principles, very effectively. But with the private insurers letting costs creep up, Medicare has to keep increasing its payment rates, too, or providers will drop out of participation. So individuals costs go up, and government costs go up.

When the costs strangle our economy, voters will go crazy and Republicans will capitalize on that by claiming the “reforms” were to blame, and we can kiss true reform goodbye. Congress will tinker some more as our economy turns us into a third-world debtor nation.

We have three choices – 1) make it illegal for insurance companies to make profits and put severe regulations on their operations, or 2) maintain more of a free market and make them compete with a non-profit public option to force prices down, or 3) expand our successful Medicare program to all Americans.

Since the Dems took 3) off the table before they even started negotiating, we don’t have any hope of that one. Choice 1) would take an act of God, not just an act of Congress.

The public option has to be big enough, and strong enough, to have the cost-containing impact we need. If, as some Republicans are crying these days, it would be so good people would leave private insurance companies in droves and head to the public option, destroying the profitable industry, we ask: what is your priority? Affordable and great health care for all, or profits to a heartless industry that controls our very lives?

Quoting Wil Rogers, "Even if you are on the right track you will get run over if you just sit there."

Congress, if some of you don’t have the heart and balls to put real health care reform into play, then show your true selves to the electorate and let us all show you what we think.

JM

Selling Their Souls: Finance Committee Dems Give Us the Heisman

That raucous noise you heard emanating from K Street in Washington that started yesterday afternoon and carried on into the evening was the sound of health insurance lobbyists celebrating as if they’d just won the lottery. And essentially they had after basically being told by the Senate Finance Committee that their industry would be able, with their blessing, to continue legally stealing money from the American public for the foreseeable future.

The Senate Democrats, five of them in particular and three of them twice in the same session, sold us out. By turning thumbs down on not one but two plans for Health Care Reform that included a public insurance option, Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Tom Carper of Delaware, served notice that they’re more concerned about the bottom lines of the health insurance companies that have been ripping us off than they are with our bottom lines.

We all knew the Republicans on the Finance Committee, all ten of them, would vote no to any proposal that contained a public option. But we were hoping, against hope it would seem, that when push came to shove the Committee Democrats would somehow find the spine to unite in support of such a plan. Unfortunately, the five listed above all joined the GOP contingent in voting against (15 – 8) West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller’s proposal… and Baucus, Lincoln and Conrad teamed up with the Republicans yet again to defeat (13 – 10) the plan put forward by New York Democrat Charles Schumer.

The sad truth of the matter is that the Senators who have and will oppose any public option plan that’s proposed are little more than paid shills for the health insurance industry. We’ve come to expect nothing less from Republicans…it’s who they are, they’re not our friends…but we sent the Democrats to Washington expecting so much more.

The bottom line, however, is that money talks, and all you have to do is go to the Open Secrets.org website to find out just how deeply into the pockets of our lawmakers the health care sector has gotten. Pay particular attention to the information regarding the shameless five…Baucus, Lincoln, Conrad, Nelson and Carper. They’ve been well taken care of by the industry they stood up for yesterday. Now, if there’s any justice, they’ll be paid back by the voters, the people they stood against yesterday, the next time they face an election.

On a lighter note, former Alaska Governor and Vice-Presidential hopeful Sarah ‘The Quitter’ Palin has a book coming to market. Just four months after the deal was signed Palin’s memoir is finished and will be available in book stores on November 17 (oh goody…just in time for a late birthday or early Christmas present!).

The tome, entitled “Going Rogue”, will have an enormous first printing of 1.5 million copies. As one wag put it on MSNBC last night, “This could be the first time in history that someone writes a book before they actually read one”.

It’s not clear at this point if it will be enclosed in plastic wrapping like all the other first-edition comic books, but we do know this. It was ghost written by a fellow Evangelical Christian…presumably not the Holy Ghost! Nevertheless, that news prompted another observer to ask “…if that means the right wing will push to have it added to the New Testament?”

And so it goes.


SC