I had been waiting to see when the big bad almighty insurance industry would jump into the fray of the health care debate and proclaim their righteous indignation and hoot and holler about what a horrible plan it is and how it will never work. And now I know. It has arrived. I caught this article on msnbc.com - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31502468/ns/politics-white_house/ about how the president has to "line up" against them and their rhetoric and arguments against it. I love this quote he has though - "If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care ... then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business?" I love it! Personally, I don't care if the insurance industry does get run out of business. They certainly aren't helping anybody but themselves right now. They long ago forgot that the object of insurance is to spread the risk around, not avoid it completely, which is what they do when they cherry pick who they want to write a policy to, or implement "pre existing condition limitations" or go back and try to deny claims after they've paid them, or try to dictate over the heads of the doctors what medicines they can and can't prescribe for patients. In addition, the argument that the 2 cannot coexist together is nonsense. Britain has the NHS and they still have private health insurance. Canada has it's national health plan and private health plans as well. Granted, these are on a much smaller scale because the private health insurance industry is not nearly as big there as it is here. However, it does exist.
I hate the Republicans insistence on everybody keeping what they have now, and "preserving choice" - I don't think they really mean choice of health insurance, because frankly they're all pretty much the same. Bad customer service, bad claims service, runaround and red tape - you've dealt with one you've dealt with them all. I think they are worried that people won't get to go see the same doctors. I think that's really all people care about - can I see my doctor and will it cost me an arm and a leg? That's HEALTH CARE not HEALTH INSURANCE. We are getting the 2 things confused and we shouldn't. Someone I used to work with claimed that a national health care plan would not work because the doctors wouldn't be on board with it and would not see patients who had it. I beg to differ. If a government run plan has enough people on it that it is "running the insurance companies out of business" (which they all of a sudden are so afraid of) then the doctors will quickly realize that the only way to get any money at all is to accept patients on the government plan -whatever it may be. Sure they may make less money, but if they are only in it for the money maybe they shouldn't be in it at all.
I do recognize the argument that Medicaid is broken and if this ends up being an expansion of that then it will not be good because the reimbursement rates are so low. That's a problem with Medicaid I believe - any plan that responds to rising costs by shrinking reimbursement rates is profoundly screwed up. Do away with that and base it off the "usual and customary" rates that insurance companies are used to using and the problem goes away! Easy peasy nice and cheesy. I wish I could be consulted for things like this, I would have solved it ages ago. HAHA.
Also, I hate how Republicans emphasize personal responsibility because that does not even begin to encompass all the people in this country like my daughter who were born with chronic, severe, and highly complex and expensive medical conditions that no amount of healthy eating or exercise will erase. I don't want her to grow with this much uncertainty about her future. She should not be pigeonholed into a particular job or employer because it is one of the few that still offers comprehensive health insurance that will allow her to see her cardiologists, get her meds, and heaven help us, get a heart transplant if she needs it. No one knows how long kids can go with the Fontan circulation that she has, I hope it never happens but I would not be surprised if one day she ends up on that organ donation waiting list for a heart. How on earth is it fair to deny someone like her access to the care she needs to satisfy some company's bottom line? It's not!
Most of you will not understand this last bit, but those of you who are LDS will - many of you vote Republican and are against this. Many of you also spout off about "why should I help someone else when I have worked so hard for what I have and to provide for my own family". Think about this - that kind of attitude is precisely why there is no more United Order or Law of Consecration. What do you think those things were if not all of us pulling together for the greater good and helping out those who needed it more than us? I am a "have-not" but I work just as hard as many of the "haves", why should I and my family be left out in the cold because someone else thinks they shouldn't have to?
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2 comments:
Wow, I appreciate your enthusiasm and courage to make a post like this; I usually avoid them on my blog just because there never seems like enough room for in depth discourse about it. But I want comment on your post so I'm going to. I am personally anti-middle men in health care. I think they should abolish all gov. programs, private insurance, etc . . . I think that the market should be allowed to dictate the price of care, procedures, and medicine. There should be no intermediate between the Health Care provider and the patient. That's a snapshot of my opinion. There's really not enough room to keep going, particularly about special miracles like your daughter. Though I do think that it's interesting that you bring up the Law of Consecration . . . because one of the primary principles that our goverment operates on is separation of church and state. If we did have socialized medicine or pushed for it it's not priesthood holders that would be operating the administration of a national health care plan but men without any stwardship from God - so how is it possible to draw a parallel between socialized medicine and the Law of Consecration? The Law of consecration IS the law of consecration because of Priesthood authority. Socialized medicine is to the Law of Consecration what "living together," is to marriage a bad imitation without inspiration or efficacy. We should continue this conversation. I hope that my zest didn't offend you. I appreciated yours in spite of my differing opinions.
I've heard some pretty shocking comments from people in the church, even in the context of a Sunday school class, that just makes me wonder about poeple's attitudes.
I think it's completely selfish and arrogant to refuse to help out someone else if you can. Most people who are uninsured in this country work full time.
Plus, if we've got the best system in the country (as conservatives would have us believe) then why don't other countries drop what they have and use our model???
I can't afford to "let the market take care of itself" - I believe that laissez faire economics in general does not work. People are too greedy to just let things be. They're never satisfied.
And the separation of church and state is a pretty common misconception in my opinion. The framers of the constitution did not say that church and state should be completely separate (the way it is being interpreted now), they only said that there should be no state religion, and that government can't prefer one over the other or prevent the free exercise of it. It's been interpreted over the years to what people think it is now, and that's not necessarily what it said in the Constitution.
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