With all the talk about “health care reform” going on these days, I figured I would eventually weigh in. Nobody is seriously proposing the adoption of a british-style health care system where the federal government owns the hospitals and employs the staff there. This isn’t health care reform, it is health insurance reform. If you are currently happy with your health care, that probably means you are either healthy or like your doctor. Nobody’s assuming control of your doctor.
My online tovarisch kcmeesha described the current push for health insurance reform as “hasty.” Hasty as in we’ve been arguing about the particulars since the early 1990’s when Clinton tried to get something done? Hasty like maybe we should let this situation simmer for another twenty years or so, when Medicare overruns are so ghastly that a trillion-dollar pricetag will look cheap? Politicians are not instrisically brave creatures. They act when pressured. They expose themselves to risk only when doing otherwise is more risky. Somebody has to apply pressure to them to get any real progress. Telling a congress-critter he has to act “or else” means nothing without a deadline. See how far the religious right has gotten with telling the Republicans to protect unborn babies; the pro-lifers enforce no deadline and get no action.
16-23% of private insurance premiums get eaten up by corporate bureaucracy, executive compensation, lobbying, and corporate profit (depending on the company in question). 97% of medicare’s revenue goes to patient care. If the government is inherently wasteful (generally this is true), then private insurance is six to thirteen times as wasteful. The health care reform act should consist of revising the existing medicare act to remove the phrase “over 65.” It would be more efficient and save billions of dollars. But that isn’t going to happen because, as I mentioned, congressmen are cowards.
Some of us would rather pay some honest taxes than fritter away a huge portion of our insurance premiums to a bunch of faceless vampires that primarily make their profit margins by denying care to sick customers.
HR3200, which nobody ever seems to honestly reference.
