Over the weekend, I happened to hear a piece on NPR about young adults without health insurance. Why didn’t they have coverage? Because they couldn’t afford it. One young lady explained that it was a simple choice between paying for insurance or paying the rent. One Democratic Senator they interviewed agreed that this was a problem, and the answer was the individual mandate, or as I prefer to call it mandatory insurance. How exactly forcing people to buy something they can’t afford solves anything, I don’t know.
And that’s where the public option comes in. The insurance companies have proven that given the chance, they will raise prices and deny coverage whenever possible, or offer “affordable” plans so spartan that they don’t actually cover anything. A public option that anybody can buy into keeps the insurance companies honest, because We The People can say “enough of enriching my **** insurance company!”
We The People understand this. Alas, our Senators do not. They are so beholden to special interests that they have killed the public option, or threatened to load it up with nonsense and requirements and triggers and abortion bans and only lobbyists know what else. Our healthcare debate has become so tortured that other world leaders are asking our President what the heck is going on.
If they pass nothing more than mandatory insurance and a few cosmetic reforms, Howard Dean correctly predicts a backlash.
Not everyone agrees that the public option is dead, but it sure looks to be in critical condition.
If this is what we are left with, let’s just scrap it all. Let’s put together 5 pages of legislation that does the most critical things we need out of health insurance reform:
- Outlaw pre-existing conditions in all forms and for every purpose including pricing, coverage, and claims.
- Regulate rate increases, perhaps indexed to inflation (CPI increase + 5%?).
- Put doctors, not insurance clerks, in charge of making medical decisions.
- Change the tax code so that everybody can deduct health insurance premiums even if they don’t itemize and even if they aren’t self-employed.
I think everybody except insurance companies and their purchased members of Congress can agree that these things are essential. If we can’t agree on anything else, let’s not make things worse.