Posted by
Real Guy on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 6:50:19 PM
While President Obama is trying to suppress all criticism of his Health Reform (Health Insurance Reform?) agenda I'll try to add my two cents worth on the raging debate. I believe the president lacks credibility on this issue and that he has apparently shut down his listening apparatus. Maybe it is people like me have been too strident, too vocal, or too energized. I honestly think that President Obama thinks that if he doesn't get something passed this year he will lose all momentum. Maybe he should. Maybe we should take our time and fully understand what the heck he's talking about.
President Obama says we have been spreading misinformation while I believe, as do many others, that he is the one spreading misinformation. First, I believe that President Obama has been trying to defend and explain a plan that doesn't exist yet. Depending on what you read and hear, there are a number of draft bills in the House and Senate, none of which have been voted out by the bodies drafting them and none of which has been pushed through the joint committee compromising process. Key elements of these bills have been talked about in soundbite generalities, but a stable plan or bill is not yet published.
How can we honestly debate something when we don't know what it is? A Kaiser Family Fund website,
http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm, has actually published a side-by-side comparison of four separate proposed plans including two Senate plans, one House bill, and President Obama's Principles for Healthcare Reform which is not a bill, but a set of concepts he outlined in February 2009 (which he seems to be updating on the fly).
Here are some things that President Obama has said that I do not believe:
1. "If you like your current plan you can keep your plan and your doctor" or words to that effect. I don't believe this. Once a public option becomes the preferred source of healthcare for small businesses struggling with costs, they will throw employees over the fence and employees will find themselves in Medicare style plans which will not compensate many physicians adequately for services rendered. In this type of scenario I lose my plan and most likely I will lose my doctor.
2. "It (Health Insurance Reform) will be deficit neutral." This is code speech and nobody I know believes it. It is code speech because it means that the government costs for this will be shuffled from somewhere else (most notably a large part will be cut and transferred from the defense industry). I have trouble believing that there is enough discretionary money in other parts of the federal budget to pay for whatever is being planned. Anybody familiar with the explosive growth of Medicare costs shoul also be skeptical. Taxes will have to be raised also -- significantly.
3. "There won't be Death Panels." Rationing is inevitable. It happens all the time now. For people in HMO/PPO style plans, the rationers for care are primary care physicians. They decide what's needed and authorize tests, procedures, and specialist involvement. Now the government will be in the way. I don't see how some government bureaucrat somewhere won't be involved in rationing decisions. There won't be infinite resources for delivering procedures, surgeries, medications, and tests to cover every condition. This has always been true. It's just that now the decision will be made by a govvie. Perhaps it will be a physician who is a government employee but it will still be a government employee. Life and death decisions will be in the hands of the government.
4. "Our current system is broken." Is it? Over sixty percent of the people who've responded to various polls seem to be indicating that they're "happy" with their current health plans (who is actually HAPPY with a health plan?). Are we destroying the village in order to save it?
5. "Over 40 million people are uninsured." I believe this number is highly suspect. I believe this number includes illegal immigrants and voluntarily uninsured young people who don't believe they'll ever get sick and don't want to spend $150 a month that they can use elsewhere. Second, if this is the problem then buy insurance for these people and give it away like the federal government is doing for "Clunkers".
6. "Affordable healtcare coverage will be available for everybody." This seems like code speech for taxpayer subsidies. Health costs are what they are. Can we get all the doctors, nurses, and administrators take a 50% pay cut? Are we going to run all of the health insurance companies and their employees out of business? Most people, like me, believe that one of the cost growth areas in employer or private health insurance has been the requirement to subsidize Medicare and other government medical programs. Their reimbursement rates are notoriously inadequate in many categories. It is widely believed that hospitals and doctors compensate for this with higher billings to employer held or individually owned insurance plans.
7. "Health care in the U.S. is in a crisis." Really? What kind of crisis? Oh. We're talking about the uninsured again. Buy insurance for them. Next issue? Oh, you don' really want to buy insurance for them? You want to overhaul the whole system in order to make it impossible to figure out what coverage for these 10 to 40 million people cost? You don't want to deal with tort reform because your buddies are trial lawyers? Your political career may bottom out if you can't push it through this year? I think the crisis has to do with President Obama's career track for the most part.
Those are my top seven issues with Obamacare -- a plan that has yet to actually be published.
I believe that a large change like this should not be made in haste. I also believe that it is probably a mistake to change it all at once as a result of one massive legislative nightmare of a bill.
Let's tackle health reform more reasonably. After all, it's about our health. It's not about President Obama's career.