With the GOP win in Massachusetts there has been a lot of talk about what to do with health care reform. Some on the left pushing for immediate action while others call for stopping all reform now. What I can’t understand is why we can’t at least do stage one of the process.
There are a number of aspects to health care reform that are, as far as I know, quite non controversial.
- Preventing companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions
- Requiring that all plans provide preventative care, like annual physicals, at little or no cost
- Preventing companies from dropping coverage due to a serious illnesses
- Preventing companies from making large rate hikes due to serious illnesses
- Eliminating lifetime caps on coverage
This is just a short list, I’m sure there are other aspects to reform that are also fairly non controversial. So why can’t we agree to pass this part of reform now, allow it to go into effect and see what improvements it makes ?
We could then continue to discuss larger scale issues like providing subsidies to help lower income people obtain coverage, allowing the formation of cooperatives to buy group coverage, possible public options, etc.
But in the meantime it is quite possible that the above reforms could help millions of people.
Yet nobody seems to be willing to do it. The only logical reason for this seems to be that the left doesn’t want to give up an issue and the right doesn’t want to give Obama any sort of victory.
To me this seems like a no brainer.