WHY IS HEALTH CARE REFORM SUCH A DIFFICULT TASK?

Misinformation & misunderstanding could kill Obama´s health care reform efforts.

...The Official Canadian Health Care Logo

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told US Representative Bob Inglis to "keep your government hands off my Medicare." The South Carolina GOP congressman tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program, but Mr. Inglis said the man just, "wasn´t having any of it."

A similar situation happened in one of the Town Hall Meetings that President Obama had last week where a woman said she "didn´t want government getting between her and her doctor, she didn´t want socialized medicine and to leave my Medicare alone".

It´s amazing that even the conservative columnists and right-wing talkers, such as the NEW YORK TIMES and FOX News´, Bill Kristol, have their own problems in trying to talk down about a future public option in US health care. Mr. Kristol said recently in an interview that the "government cannot run any public operation efficiently and cost effectively".

Then Mr. Kristol stepped on his own tongue when he proceeded to tell Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that the government operated VA Hospitals provided "the best heath care for US vets that money can buy". Mr. Stewart nailed Mr. Kristol on his gaff and Mr. Kristol then kind of blubbered his way through the remaining minutes of the interview.

And regarding the government run health care coverage in other countries such as Canada and Europe, on a recent radio talk show, a caller called in to say that he was in the process of getting his US Citizenship, but he was not giving up his current Canadian citizenship. He explained that he was keeping his duel-citizenship only because of Canada´s single payer health care system. He told the story of how he lives and works in the US and he goes to Canada once every year just to have his "totally free" annual checkup. He said that there is never any long lines at the clinics and he can call and get an appointment with his regular doctor during the same week while he is visiting his mother in Canada.

This caller went on to say that his mother also had a knee replaced in the Canadian system, and as it wasn´t a life threatening operation, she had to wait only one month for the knee operation. Everything went very well, her new knee works just fine and all she paid was $75.00 for the cable TV she watched while in the hospital.

The caller also mentioned that his father in the US died of colon cancer because he waited too long to go see the American doctors due to their high costs. The doctors had said that they probably could have taken care of all of his father´s cancer, if they could have diagnosed it early enough.

These are just a few of the stories that show that it´s not just that Americans today don´t understand what President Obama is proposing; many Americans just don´t understand the way an American public health care option would work. They specifically don´t understand, that getting the government involved in health care is not a radical new step: the government is already deeply involved in health care and has been for decades.

For some reason, most American´s don´t understand that American VA Hospitals, Social Security, the US Postal Service, Medicare and Medicaid are all government run programs and they are usually pretty efficient and cost effective. This is not to say that these programs can´t be improved, but even the Congress and all federal employees (and remember, the US government is the country´s largest employer) have a very efficient, single payer public health care program.

Today, most Americans have private health insurance through their employers. And until it started getting so expensive, most Americans have said that they were reasonably satisfied with their health care plans. How is that possible, when private insurance works so badly and it´s been getting worse for years?

Here is are some example of today´s private insurance stories:

As was stated in a recent article in the New York Times, "Private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient´s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend."

The Times article went on to say: "And in their efforts to avoid "medical losses,"( the industry term for paying the medical bills), insurers spend much of the money taken in through premiums NOT on medical treatment, but on "underwriting"; or screening out people likely to make insurance claims. In the individual [private] insurance market, where people buy insurance directly rather than getting it through their employers, so much money goes into underwriting and other expenses that only around 70 cents of each premium dollar actually goes to care. "

Today, the US government directly provides insurance via Medicare and those other health care programs. Today, Medicare, which is one of those "single payer" systems that Republicans and conservatives love to demonize, covers every American 65 and older. And for years, surveys have shown that Medicare recipients are much more satisfied with their coverage than Americans with private insurance.

Conservative right-wingers that are against reform would have you believe that President Obama is a flaming socialist, attacking the free market. But when will it be understood that unregulated, for-profit markets just don´t work for public health care? They never have, and they never will. The only reason that we have a working health care system today is because the government covers the elderly, while a current combination of regulation and tax subsidies makes it possible for many, but not all, nonelderly Americans to get decent private coverage, mainly through their employers.

So, if you currently have decent health care coverage, you should thank the government. It´s true that if you´re young and healthy, with nothing in your medical history that could possibly have raised red flags with the insurance accountants, you might have been able to get insurance without government intervention. But time and chance happen to us all, and the only reason you have a reasonable prospect of still having insurance coverage when you need it is the large role that the government already plays.

What President Obama is currently proposing is to use additional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us in America. And as the Times article stated, that´s not radical; it´s as American as, well…..is Medicare.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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