As the health insurance reform debate rages on, it seems clear that We The People are at risk of being scammed.
You see, a lot of “experts” — insurance company lobbyists/executives and the politicians they have purchased — think that the way to make sure everybody has access to health care is to simply pass a law saying everybody has to buy it! Make a penalty for anyone who for whatever reason can’t participate. I call this system Mandatory Health Care, because that’s the most accurate description. It’s delightfully simple, except for this:
1) Nobody is forcing the insurance companies to charge reasonable rates, nor preventing them for making it difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to get/afford insurance.
2) Nobody is making insurance companies actually pay for needed treatment in a timely fashion.
3) Nobody is doing anything about bloated insurance company profits, marketing budgets, and executive pay scales that cost consumers money without providing any care.
4) This does nothing to help entrepreneurs who must find a way to afford insurance for his/her family and employees while running a small company in a difficult economy. I would love to see a small business study for Massachusetts: I bet the number of active small businesses has shrunk more than the recession alone would account for in the last few years. The closest any of the available plans get to equalizing the playing field for small businesses is to make insurance benefits taxable for everyone! I’m not sure who that’s supposed to help other than big businesses that are already wildly profitable.
5) Mandatory insurance has resulted in a shortage of providers in Massachusetts, despite the fact that in countries where they actually have universal health care, there is a similar number of providers per thousand patients and no shortage.
6) It doesn’t magically make anybody able to afford premiums — the single biggest reason people don’t have coverage. (And how exactly will a homeless person get the bill, let alone pay it?)
Our system of paying for health care is broken, and the people who brought it to us want to scare us into being a captive audience. This issue is too important to be turned into nothing more than a political football. Let’s not make things worse by forcing every citizen to participate in a broken system. Susie’s right: if the powers that be really wanted reform, they would call the one guy who knows more about how health insurance really works in this country than anybody else, Howard Dean.
Insist on a true, universal public option. Do not let Congress settle for Mandatory Health Insurance.
Don’t take the heat off anti-abortion terror groups either: Tiller’s assassin has warned of more violence unless his viewpoint is immediately adopted and abortion outlawed (textbook definition of terrorism). There is nothing to be said between the points of view until the anti-abortion movement completely renounces and expels the terrorists within.
In Closing: stick a fork in Norm Coleman, he’s done (seat Senator Franken already!); why did the British press have to tell us that American banks are lobbying to not be held to any rules?; it turns out that rural areas have homeless people too; even if the recession ends tomorrow, the unemployment rate may rise for another year or two, and it’s a pretty awful trend now; mindfulness is a good thing; maybe Scholastic Books should stick to selling books.