...Mandatory private health insurance proposals are all stick and no carrot.
The average health insurance premium for a family of four is just over 12 grand per year. What middle-class family making, say, 60,000 bucks per year can afford that bill?
What we need is the carrot of affordable health care. That means government standardizing charges by insurers, doctors, hospitals and drug companies. No more $6 Tylenol in the hospital.
The reason health insurance is so unaffordable today is that no one is watching the costs. With standardization, insurance would be cheaper and people would want to buy it -- not have to because the government is threatening them with a tax penalty.
Oh wait, I can hear the plaintive cry of the free market. You can't tell a doctor, insurer, hospital or drug company what's reasonable to charge. That's socialism. Well, how reasonable then is it to tell every American you have to buy a product whose cost is obscene if you want to be a U.S. citizen? Isn't that corporate socialism?
Mandatory health insurance is a government bailout of a free market that's failed its customers. Fewer people and employers are buying private health insurance because it costs so much more and delivers so little.
Adds wise old Wiken:
We will be barraged with a bunch of smoke and mirrors designed to give the appearance of making health care affordable, but which will actually make huge salaries of insurance and health care administrators even more lucrative and will continue to suck the life out of the economy and stifle new business startups. And as the commentary above indicated make it possible for ever larger political contributions to politicians so they can spread more smoke and mirrors when their previous proposals fail to deliver anything significant.
Time to say goodbye to a private health insurance system that has failed and hello to a single-payer system that is efficient.
While I'm thinking of it, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson helps us follow the money [again, emphasis mine -- nothing like political shysterism to make me feel emphatic]:
The Zaniya Project has 12 days to edit Recommendation #14 out of its final report. Let's hope they hear some complaints and come up with a plan that serves everyone, not just the rich insurance guys. If you're going to be socialist, Zaniya Task Force, you might as well go whole hog and help everyone, not engage in this charade of protecting the failing free market.The hold of the healthcare industry on the top candidates is already apparent. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top recipient of campaign contributions so far from the pharmaceutical and health products industry is Republican Mitt Romney ($228,260). But the next two are Democrats Barack Obama ($161,124) and Hillary Clinton ($146,000). The top recipient of contributions from health professionals is Clinton ($990,611). Romney is second at $806,837, and Obama third at $748,637.
The top recipient of cash from the insurance industry, which includes health insurers, is another Democrat, Connecticut's Christopher Dodd, at $605,950. Romney and Republican Rudolph Giuliani are second and third, with Clinton and Obama fourth and fifth. Even though Obama is in fifth place, he still has collected $269,750 from insurance companies.
In a category that is relatively small in money thus far, but huge in terms of healthcare morality, Democratic presidential candidates occupy four of the top six spots in receiving money from death-dealing tobacco companies. After Giuliani's $69,500 from tobacco companies, Dodd has received $45,400, Clinton $32,300, Romney $31,400, Obama $7,885, and Democrat Joe Biden, $4,000. [Derrick Z. Jackson, "Kucinich Is Right on Healthcare," Boston Globe, 2007.08.29.]
what I find ironic about these recommendations is that a lot of them are vague. They have goals attached but provide no direction. The first few are like this until the recommendations get more specific.
ReplyDeleteIf the current system is spiraling out of control, wouldn't a better solution be to establish a new way of doing things instead of putting bandaids on the existing problem?
Besides, if the federal government can provide veterans with all the medical coverage they require and not charge them anything, (and no, I'm not arguing that veterans don't deserve it) why can't that system be expanded to cover everyone? Sure there are flaws there as well, but there should be a way to fix that system in order to expand coverage to everyone.
Thanks for commenting here! now we need more folks like you to send your comments to the Zaniya Project! Let's give them a piece of our mind!
ReplyDeletewow was that logic lame. Mandating everyone have some level of heath insurance that they are free to choose from competing interests is a sop to corporate interests but mandating everyone pay for the exact same healthcare no matter what they might want...thats great. Single-payer cool-aid anyone?
ReplyDelete"The average health insurance premium for a family of four is just over 12 grand per year. What middle-class family making, say, 60,000 bucks per year can afford that bill?"
Well apparently enough of them do that the statistical average family IS paying it...after all that is what makes it AVERAGE. Part of the reason for this number is the fact that evil employers are paying more and more money for health coverage while mindless masses complain that their benefits are declining. Sounds like the very meaning of inflation, only the individual is so insulated from the reality of the cost they blame the employer for it. Letting the government handle everything will only make that worse. The government trying to fix prices has been tried repeatedly before, with disasterous consequences. The great energy debacles in California and the grand gas lines of Carter's day are two of the most memorable.
Mandating everyone get coverage is not a quick fix. If auto insurance is a good indicator there will be a lot of people who simply wont comply and we wouldn't be able to pull people over for speeding and ask for proof of health insurance :) That diminishes the advantage of the strategy because the people who wont want to pay for coverage they don't feel like they need are the ones that could potentially disperse some of the risk for the rest of us...but this magnifying glass on contributions is pure black helicopter stuff. I couldn't care less.