THE HEALTH CARE DEBACLE

Three times in my life I have seen the country at odds over health care. The first was over the creation of Medicare, and it was a quiet storm compared to what’s going on today.

Today’s battle is epitomized by this anecdote from an article in the Washington Post that told of a health care town hall meeting in South Carolina where ‘a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to "keep your government hands off my Medicare."’ The Congressman tried to explain that Medicare is a government program, but heckler would not listen.

That would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, but it illustrates how successful the anti-insurance reform right wing has been in confusing their followers.

The argument isn’t really about health care reform at all. No matter what Washington does in the coming weeks, the kind of health care people get in this country won’t change. If it was about health care reform, the AMA wouldn’t be endorsing it because that would call for restructuring of physician and hospital incomes to European levels.

The Democrats are trying to take the power over and control of health care delivery out of the hands of the insurance industry. Given that we all are or know people who have gone without coverage due to cost or pre-existing conditions or been denied payment for services even if we have coverage, I can’t see why anyone including Tea Partiers wouldn’t want that.

The Republican counter-budget as written by Paul Ryan – R, Wisconsin contains their proposals, touted as the way to avoid “socialism” and a “government takeover of health care”. Here they are:
1. Significantly reduce benefits to anybody under 55 at the time of passage, and then privatize social security.
2. Replace Medicare with a system of vouchers for buying private health insurance.

Why in God’s name would I want to trade the Medicare I now have and which allows me to see primary care doctors for $10 a visit, specialist for $35 and hospital costs with a reasonable deductible for a voucher to get back into private insurance? That is insanity.

We have operated our own business for over twenty years during which I carried catastrophic insurance with a $5,000 deductible at a cost of about $3,000 a year. My wife couldn’t get that wonderful coverage because she had pre-existing conditions, so her catastrophic coverage – excluding those conditions – ran about $5,000 a year. Our average income over those years averaged below the $65,000 level, so on average about 12% of our gross income went to insurance we never used. Beyond that, if we had needed to use it, we might have found out, as several friends have, that our insurance would not pay for the services we needed.

I’m also pretty fond of my social security check, minimal as it is. I did my own saving for retirement, but social security is the hedge against loss of private investments in a shaky market. I wish they’d just expand Medicare and be done with it.