You have to love the left. Really, you do. They are so much fun to watch when they are in charge. When liberals or 'progressives' were out of power, they organized union labor activists, environmental activists, pro-abortion, gay rights, and whatever 'cause of the day' forces they could muster to march, protest, write letters, and interrupt public meetings. It was just fine when liberals organized and protested. Protest is the highest form of patriotism! It's the power of the people! It's the will of the nation! It's a grassroots movement!
How the language changes when circumstances are reversed. Today, when regular citizens show up in huge numbers to oppose fundamental and ruinous changes to the medical care Americans receive, the progressives label it 'Astro-turf.' I mean, who could oppose such an effective, efficient, and fiscally responsible entity like the federal government running our medical system?
So why are Americans so upset with Obama-care? Bait and switch.
Sure, it's easy to tell everyone I am going to make sure the 40 million people who don't have health insurance receive coverage. Everyone says, yea, do something about those people. However, if you were listening closely to what candidate Obama was saying, and were not sucked into the hopey-changey rhetoric, you would have known this was coming.
Americans wanted health insurance coverage for folks who do not have it. Take care of them, but do not change my health care. I like my doctor, and my small co-pays, and my prescription drug coverage. Don't change my health care; just do something for those other people. That is what America thought when they elected President Obama, change the bad, keep the good.
The President, ladies and gentlemen, does not want to fix American health care, he wants fundamentally change how we receive health care. He and the liberal/progressive elements in Congress want to eliminate private health care insurance and ultimately replace it with a single-payer, government run health care system. No amount of elegant, legal, and technical talking points about "keeping what you have" can stand up to the what is written in black and white in the two House bills being debated right now.
When the president says you can keep you private insurance, you can keep your doctor; he is parsing his words so very carefully. If you have private insurance coverage through your employer, and you lose your job, presto, you are now permanently in the "qualified plan" or public option system of limited care. If your employer looks at the $1,000 per family he is paying for your private insurance, and the subsidized cost of the 'public option' is $500 per family, you going to get the limited care public option whether you want it or not. If your private insurance makes any changes to your policy, co-pays or deductibles, you will have to move into a qualified plan. So I guess if you never change jobs, never change coverage, never change doctors, never change providers, you can keep your private insurance. Good luck with that.
The public option of government run health care will not be anything close to what we have now. Please spare me the "we pay more for health care and our system is 37th in the world" speech. Why is it billionaires and regular folks from all over the world come to America for our 37th best health care? We pay more, because we earn more, and we also get more. You can make statistics say what ever you want, but when it comes to life-saving medicine, people leave their socialized-medical utopias to come to America.
Every government run health care system has to keep costs down by rationing health care. It's just a fact. If you are seventy one years old and need a hip replacement, sorry, you're not contributing to the system, so you get pain medication and mandatory end-of-life counseling. Long waits, for less care, fewer doctors and fewer choices isn't something Nancy Pelosi and President want you to know about. And we haven't even mentioned the trillions of dollars this will cost, or the 500 billion in cuts to the Medicare system.
Therefore, when congressional Democrats come home to angry constituents, it's not astro-turf, it is as real as it gets. The government screwed up the housing market by requiring lenders to give mortgages to folks who had no business owning homes, subsequently, our home prices plummeted, our home equity disappeared or we lost our homes to foreclosure. We are still reeling from that government induced calamity. If the government screws up our health care, I don't even want to think of the consequences.
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11 comments:
Mr. RoughStock,
This is a continuation of my first reply.
You state that the commercial insurance will be unable to compete with "subsidized" public insurance. I don't see where you get the subsidized part - everything that I have heard or read about it says that it will be self funded - NOT subsidized.
Mr. RoughStock,
I read your blog/article but could not make must sense of out it. It was interesting in that you may have pinned down the main fear, that the proposed health care plan will lessen the level of care for those who are lucky enough to have health care insurance. That is a valid concern, and one that should be protected carefully.
I am trying to string together a number of comments because of space limitations, but they seem to be getting out of order.
However, some of your comments don't seem to follow any logic that I can figure out. For example, you say that what happens if lose your job you would then permanentaly be in a qualified plan. First off, as it now stands if you lose your job you are not in a qualified plan, in fact you are in no plan at all. Sure you could purchase COBRA if you can afford it when you just lost your job. Fat chance for most folks doing that - they will get to have no plan. Now lets see, is "no plan" a whole lot better than a "qualified plan?" I thnk not.
However, some of your comments don't seem to follow any logic that I can figure out. For example, you say that what happens if lose your job you would then permanentaly be in a qualified plan. First off, as it now stands if you lose your job you are not in a qualified plan, in fact you are in no plan at all. Sure you could purchase COBRA if you can afford it when you just lost your job. Fat chance for most folks doing that - they will get to have no plan. Now lets see, is "no plan" a whole lot better than a "qualified plan?" I thnk not.
The next mistatement is that you will be permanentaly relegated to a qualified plan - that is untrue, you can always purchase a "commercial" plan if you can afford it. Once you get a new job, if that employer has a health care plan benefit, then you will be able to get that just as before.
You seem to be saying that no plan is far superior to a government run option - kind of like Medicare right now except paid for by the user. For some odd reason I don't see many elders purchasing a commercial package instead of Medicare. They could if they wanted to, but generally that doesn't happen. In fact, most retires look forward to getting on Medicare so they can stop purchasing private insurance for many reasons - including the limitations for health care by private plans, and the presence of a coverage cap.
You state that the commercial insurance will be unable to compete with "subsidized" public insurance. I don't see where you get the subsidized part - everything that I have heard or read about it says that it will be self funded - NOT subsidized.
You also state that every government run health care system keeps costs down by rationing health care. You can expand that to include every health care funding organization including private insurance (or are you missing all of the stories, facts, studies and other evidence proving that private insurance companies manage health care costs by "rationing" heath care). Of course there must be a rationing of health care, but that doesn't mean that it is necessarily bad - if done properly it only means that the health care is limited to things that are needed and are known to work rather then just opening it up to whatever a person might feel like they would have done. This is a distracting and inane comment - sure health care get "rationed" "managed" "controlled" or whatever terms you want to use to make sure that the money is spent wisely. However, the experience that I am aware of in the USA is that medicare always supports and pays for what the doctors order - they leave that decision up to you and your doctor. On the other hand, there is a huge body of evidence that proves that the private insurance companies are constantly refusing to pay for procedures, constantly contradicting what the doctors want to do, and are always in the middle of making the health care decisions based upon dollars. You are right about the issue, but you have the outcome backwards.
You are pretty impressive with throwing around "facts" - but it would be much more impressive if your facts happen to be facts instead of unfounded statements. I am interested in listening and learning about concerns and real facts, but I find the kind of wild unfounded allegations thrown about by you to be appalling and extremely distructive. Why not trying to stick to the facts for a little while and run through the arguments that you worry about, judging upon what actually happens, and what the proposals actually are. Maybe if you could force yourself to keep an open mind you would suprise yourself and find your opinion changing.
That said, I too have lots of problems with what I hear about the Obama plan - mostly that he is leaning to put even more money and more control into the hands of the private insurers. In my opinion, the insurance companies have had plenty of time to show us that they can do it right - but no matter what happens, they just keep on getting it more and more wrong. What makes you think that continuing to do the same thing in the hopes that a better solution will emerge makes any sense? I think there is something about doing the same thing over and over with the expectations that the outcome will be different is the definition of insanity. Why would we want to maintain our current state of insanity? Why not join the effort to find a solution that actually meets all of the needs, including those that you seem to worry about? Why not work toward a solution, rather than just fighting to continue with a process that clearly doesn't work?
Charlie, all I can do is point out what is in the House bill and Senate conference bills, and where those policies will ultimately lead. True these are not "facts" as they have yet to signed into law.
You seem to believe that the rationing going on in the private health care system is the same as the rationing that takes place in places with a single-payer government system. You must be kidding. That must be why patients from all over the world come here to get life saving care.
As to your point that Medicare always supports and pays what the doctors order, people with private insurance subsidize the medicare patients by paying more for our procedures. Ask anyone who works in a hospital billing department. They will tell you the medicare reimbursements have been reduced to the point where without private patients, it would be almost impossible to keep the hospital doors open. Think of what will happen when the majority of patients are in the government system. If I am an employer and the subsidized public option costs less and I can get rid of a major HR headache, your private insurance is gone. Read the House Bill page 16- "Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
As for the government option paying for itself, read the CBO report. Besides taking 500 Billion from medicare, which is why the seniors are angry, the cost of the proposed legislation will top 1 Trillion dollars.
Do I think insurance costs too much? Yes I do. I have lost a job and payed through COBRA for my insurance, it was not much fun and I paid out of pocket for about three years for my family.
I suggest tort reform as the first step to reduce costs, I like the idea of electronic health records but it will not save a trillion dollars.
You know what would be great, it would great for our President to actually write up his plan and not leave it to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. When he says "that is not part of my plan" he is telling the truth because he has not proposed a plan.
Read the House bill and read the Congressional Budget Offices' reports, you may be amazed.
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