# I am puzzled about part of the health care reform debate. "Single payer" and "public option" advocates assert that failure to implement their positions at minimum means that nothing gets better for customers. This fails to take into account two major problems facing individuals: recission and pre-existing conditions.
Personally speaking, as someone who has worked in the insurance industry, I would like very much to see all health insurers be socialized, nationalized, or run out of business and sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Recission means dropping a customer's coverage, typically for a (any) error in the customer's application. Pre-existing conditions, such as high blood pressure, being overweight, history of tobacco or drug/alcohol use, etc. are also used to deny insurance coverage. For individuals attempting to obtain private insurance coverage in the "free market" recission and pre-existing condition exclusion mean that often private health insurance is not available AT ANY PRICE — particularly for someone over 50! Thus, Congress could improve the existing situation simply by prohibiting these practices and by setting maximum prices and minimum coverage levels. That would leave the problem of covering those unable to afford even basic insurance.
Another problem intimately tied to the health insurance debate is linkage of health care to employment. I can think of few things as destructive to the economy and jobs as tying health care to employment. Historically this has meant that employers attempt to use part-time employees, temps and outsourcing to minimize health care costs. For individuals, tying health care coverage to employment means that losing employment means losing health
care; COBRA continuation of coverage is both expensive and temporary, and for a sick, unemployed person it is truly the end of the line: no job, and pre-existing conditions mean bankruptcy and no possibility of obtaining affordable insurance coverage!
Tying health insurance to employment also means reduced mobility. At a time when the US economy needs radical restructuring, individuals are more likely to fight like cornered weasels to keep their shitty low-paying jobs doing crap work for exploitative companies than to relocate to areas of the country where good jobs are available. I do not know why the Democrats in particular have mandated employer-based health care for so many years. Perhaps it is just a no-brainer to drop the million pound shit-hammer on "rich" corporations when the running for re-election. One of the reasons the GM went bust is health care costs. Thanks, Congress! Heckuva job, vote sluts!
Personally speaking, as someone who has worked in the insurance industry, I would like very much to see all health insurers be socialized, nationalized, or run out of business and sent to Guantanamo Bay. The main problem with the private, for-profit insurance business is the nature of the business itself. Insurers make money two ways: 1) paying out in benefits less than they charge in premiums; and 2) investing premiums.
For example, suppose that my insurer charges me $5000 a year for ten years and earns 10% profit on their investments. At the end of ten years they will have accumulated more than $100,000 to use to pay for any medical problems I might develop in the future. But what if they stink at financial investing? Typically, every time there is a financial crisis or bear market insurance
companies raise premiums to make up for their investment losses! If Bush/Obama had not squandered trillions of dollars bailing out the financial markets, many health insurance companies would have been absolutely crushed.
To imagine that we should entrust our health care futures to the investing ability of health care executives is to believe that we live in Lake Wobegon ... where all investors are above average. Since we know that American financial systems are a kind of Ponzi Scheme with a long history of fraud and government engineered wealth redistributions, the idea is ludicrous! Letting health insurers gamble with our money this way is just asking to be screwed over.
Furthermore, since we know that the federal government has a long history of monetary inflation and waste, the likelihood that health care executives can beat the market and do better than inflation over the long run is statistically unlikely; during bull market years the health care executives reward themselves lavishly, and when the markets crash, they raise premiums and cut benefits. No thanks.
FYI, here is a nice little Op-Ed from Robert Parry about the Obama health care reform disaster in progress:
Excerpt: The pattern of belligerent Republicans and timid Democrats is now repeating itself on health-care reform. Democrats first excluded from the debate the one measure that probably could save significant money — a single-payer system — and they now appear poised to trade away Obama's proposal for a "public option" to possibly garner a couple of Republican votes.
Though enacting a public option is favored by nearly three-quarters of the American people — and has the potential of at least saving some money by pressuring private insurers to rein in costs — Democrats are so entranced by the siren song of bipartisanship that they appear on the verge of scuttling it.
In doing so, the Democrats could well recreate the worst mistake of Hillary Clinton's failed health insurance plan of 1994. The fundamental flaw in her complex scheme was that it tried so hard not to harm the insurance industry that it wasn't clear how it would make matters any better — and the industry still torpedoed it with a misleading public relations campaign.
Today, the Obama administration and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus have been so proud of getting all the players to sit down at the table (with the exception of single-payer advocates who were excluded) that they have lost track of the hard reality that if the nation is really going to address its health care crisis, there will have to be some financial losers.
Right now, the losers are the tens of millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans, the doctors and nurses who are appalled at the cruelty of the US medical system, and the US businesses that pay for their employees' health insurance and thus are put at an economic disadvantage to their foreign competitors operating in countries that have single-payer systems.
#7/1/2009:
Add to this the fact people without insurance show up at emergency rooms. This is where they don't have to show proof of insurance. This is vastly more expensive than seeing a normal doctor.
So it's either emergency rooms turn away the hurt, sick and dying or pay for it- like we do now- in higher insurance for us and higher taxes. I honestly think you couldn't get doctors to work in a hospital that turns away sick and in some cases dying people at the door who have no other options.
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