http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2009/8/25/9344/03474 The Right is Very Stupid ...
by Steven D
Tue Aug 25th, 2009 at 09:56:37 AM EST
... or very greedy, or very gullible on the issue of health care. Clearly for executives of insurance companies greed is the predominant factor. Small business owners (and many large ones) who oppose universal health care with a public option are simply stupid, since our current system of providing health insurance for workers through the private sector costs them far more than their competitors in other countries. And the ordinary Joe and Jane the Plumber who rail against socialism and death panels and so forth and so on simply are extremely gullible. Otherwise they would know that one of the the leading causes of individual bankruptcies are the massive expenses of a family medical crisis, and many of those people had insurance.
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Our health insurance premiums outpace the cost of inflation and wage growth and are expected to double by 2020. And that's with companies that do their darnedest to not cover major medical conditions by the use of excluding people with pre-existing conditions ( a somewhat broadly defined term) or the ugly process of rescission where insurance companies use any excuse to cancel your coverage, and where small businesses often see dramatic rises in their insurance costs from year to year.
And not just by insurance companies, but by states too cheap to fully fund their medicaid mandates, thus condemning many people to death if the procedure they need is not covered:
The truth is, healthcare is already rationed in the states – by individuals struggling to afford even basic cover, by companies negotiating (or refusing) benefits, by government agencies trying to balance budgets. For many years I lived in a state where the legislature ranked and rated, by price, procedures people on aid could receive, and refused to cover anything deemed too expensive. Even if, as the papers frequently reported, it meant letting adorable little children die. But since it is America, you can shop around. Just across the border in a different state, the legislature decreed that pre-existing conditions could not be excluded or made the subject of increased charges under insurance plans, leading me and many others to migrate a few miles to get a better deal.
And did you know that one in four families in America affected by a family member's cancer condition are delayed needed treatment due to cost barriers? Or that in the last year one third of cancer patients in being treated in America cut pills or skipped doses of their medications? That one quarter delayed a recommended cancer screening, and on fifth did not fill a prescription? The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network does. I wonder why more Americans don't know these facts? Why doesn't our wonderful liberal media report the truth about how lousy are health care is compared to the rest of the developed world? Why do they give more media attention to people spreading known lies about health care reform proposals than they do to informing us of the massive media effort of health insurance companies to make sure those lies get spread?Those are all rhetorical questions by the way.
And what is the conservative solution to our health care mess? Cutting more taxes and eliminating regulations on insurance companies and getting rid of the parts of our system that are already "socialized" (i.e., the VA system and Medicare for people over 65). How many people outside of the folks who religiously watch Fox News sincerely believe that is the way to go? And they call progressive demands for a public option to increase competition in the health care field and keep the insurance companies honest "socialism?" I call their solution a prescription for mass murder by spreadsheet (to steal a phrase from nyceve). The wealthy would continue to get the care we need. The rest of us would pay for health care that was literally a con, because as soon as we really needed it the "fine print" in our unregulated insurance policies (assuming we had a policy) would find an exclusion which would allow our insurer to (sadly, of course) deny us the life saving medical treatment for which we and our loved ones thought we had paid.
The real question is why anyone still buys this bogus propaganda about "socialized medicine" and "death panels" and "rationing" when we already have the worst, most expensive health care system in the developed world. Maybe PT Barnum was right: there really is a sucker born every minute, and most of them seem to come out of the womb chanting USA! USA! USA!
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