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The Time Has Come The Survivor Said
Mar 19th, 2010 | 9 responses
This will be the most historically and monumental weekend that will answer the question of whether health care is a right or a personal responsibility since Congress passed similar safety net legislation on Social Security, Medicare, MediCaid and prescription drug subsidies for seniors.
I’ll defer the prestidigitation of the politics to MSNBC.com First Read whose contributors know a helluva lot more than me.
Likewise, I’ll delegate the major cost features also for explanation to First Read.
And, finally, I will refer you to this provocative question and answer session for further details between a family and the Los Angeles Times editorial board.
Now, my take which can best be described as ambivalent.
This is lousy legislation. But it is a start. I must be wearing the same shoes as Dennis Kucinich whose basic complaint for voting no on the first House health reform bill was that it didn’t go far enough. He turned after some hardball arm-twisting by President Obama. I turned after considering the alternatives of doing nothing.
It is having a baby only to discover it needs some surgical repairs. That and some tweaking as the years go by could transform it into a productive human being. Whether that means a robust public option or single-payer system as in Medicare for all, I don’t know.
I don’t believe for a New York second what the Congressional Budget Office calculates as a billion dollar savings in the first decade and a trillion or so by the end of the second decade. As for most economic projections, I won’t believe it until I see it.
I don’t subscribe to the concept of opening up 32 million new customers for private carriers to insure without more assurances they won’t continue increasing premiums, copays and axing benefits. The new commission under Health and Human Services controlling rate increases is toothless and a joke.
The way the new law would be structured allows those mandated to buy insurance or employers offering it makes me inclined to believe the penalties would be cheaper to go without. If those agnostics of the system is larger than expected, the fines and penalties won’t come close to covering the anticipated costs of those being subsidized to enroll in the programs.
Another worry I have is whether the economics of the newly structured system will force more doctors, both primary and specialists, and pharmacies to bail out of the Medicare and MediCaid programs. We have seen that happen in Washington state where Walgreens has pulled the plug on those on MediCaid.
The pharmacy I use in Southern California is a mom and pop operation. The wife told me the state’s MediCal system pays only pennies on the dollar and is as much as six moths to a year late even making those reimbursements. She said the business, which serves primarily seniors and the poor on MediCare and MediCal patients, is teetering on bankruptcy.
The question continually arises that the United States is the world’s only industrialized nation that does not have universal health care. The closest comparison of what Congress is now addressing is South Korea which enacted a system predominately serviced by private carriers in the late 1980s. As stated in the Times Q&A, by 2000 “the 139 regional insurers were combined into a single national one, with the government regulating the rates it paid to providers.”
For a year now as the debate in Congress and the media raged passionately, the only solid argument I have heard against the health reform package is that it is too expensive and too large of an undertaking to overhaul because of unemployment and the financial climate. Yes, the legislation includes some responsible amendments offered by the Republicans in both houses of Congress. To say it is not a bipartisan bill even if no Republicans vote for it is a flat out lie.
Little wonder the public is only on board by at best a 48% margin in most polls, depending on how the question is framed. Forgive them for they are bombarded with mixed messages especially if they receive the brunt of their learning exercises from either Fox or MSNBC and TV ad wars.
The taking “personal responsibility” doctrine is a legitimate argument we hear from conservatives. It’s easy to say when you are a Congressman earning $170,000 a year, excluding perks. It does not address the element of fate for the millions who are losing their homes because of unexpected medical bills the insurance carriers say exceed their costs of coverage.
It is those people who as Obama is wont to say play by the rules and still crushed by the fickle fate dilemma.
I, for one, speak as a survivor who enlisted the social netting help of the landmark Oregon Health Plan, Medicare and MediCal. Without it, I would have been one of those 43,000 people who die annually for lack of health insurance coverage in one form or another.
Without it you could have read my obituary 15 years ago. As Mark Twain said, news of my death was premature.
That is why I support the legislation now before Congress. It’s sausage now but could transform itself into my favorite food — rib eye steak — which I no longer eat for good, common sense health reasons.
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9 Responses to “The Time Has Come The Survivor Said”
Not at all, the question will remain debated between those who see it as a personal responsibility and those who wish to outsource their responsibility at least in part to a government agency. The only thing that will be settled is the voting, if that actually does occur. America will remain deeply divided on this for quite a long time to come.
It always amazes me how the many can call this legislative crap historical!! As if this crap is a positive instead of a negative. The many are always so willing to have the government(of either assinine party)cram their turd down our throats!! They never just do the right thing in the first place! Add another trillion dollar scam to the nation's bankruptcy!!
Jer, and other TMV readers,
There is no greatness here. The Dems are lucky to get anything passed at all, the way they have been.
There is no greatness here. Only the naive and unrealistic had high expectations. This is not 1965 or 1933; liberal delusions are no more than that, just delusions. We face a post-1980 reality, plus an economic slump, plus ten year or less until we begin suffering the effects of Baby Boomer retirement and societal aging in earnest, and our government overgrowth meets harsh reality and the eventual need to set priorities and to start making reductions and cancellations in what we want from government, not growth.
There is no greatness here. Specifically, what the eventual legislation is predicted to resemble is that which would set up for the entire nation the equivalent of what Mitt Romney, R-MA, oversaw in his state of Massachusetts, or what Bob Dole and select Republicans sought in place of ClintonCare in the 1990s.
DLS,
History can determine greatness or less than greatness, but much of your analysis is perceptive. The days of quasi-socialism from the liberal lions is not the present day Democratic Party. The single payor, government run retirement system that is Social Security is not reflected here. The single payor, government run health programs that are Medicare/Medicaid are not reflected here. This is weak tea… liberal lite. Historic liberal bulls like FDR and LBJ are turning in their graves that this incrementalism can masquerade for liberal and only rarely be called out from behind the mask. It is in many ways less than the compromise Nixon offered to Ted Kennedy, and is, as you correctly observe, the step-child of Massachusetts Romneyism.
“This one” is for you, Jerry—and for 29,999,999 other Americans
Good luck and God Bless.
See you Sunday
Dorian
[...] The Time Has Come The Survivor Said Tagged: health care, medicare, seniors [...]
“The days of quasi-socialism from the liberal lions is not the present day Democratic Party.”
Many kids may mistakenly see a revival of this, not just every year on campus (“discovered”) but more so right now with the Obama swoon of 2008; I don't, though there may be a revival of the Left that I am witnessing of another kind, that does reuse some of what was learned (or more correctly in many instances, believed) before.
I've done my own research that right now includes the best work by someone who actually engineered much of the New Deal and was its strongest ideological source (centralization of so much in the federal government and withering of the states; heavy regulation and use of the trend toward consolidation in industry to enable people to benefit from the efficiency of consolidation, and planning in addition to central direction and control). Hopefully this explains some of my insight. I'm opposed to this or that from liberalism (grown to know better, say I) but I continue to study and learn about it (and yes, from it) probably more than most liberals have done.
“Historic liberal bulls like FDR and LBJ are turning in their graves that this incrementalism can masquerade for liberal and only rarely be called out from behind the mask. ”
“This is weak tea… liberal lite.”
Oh, I believe I had a metaphor for this when someone else on another poster reiterated the history of this effort: single-payer to public option to co-ops to regulation (what should have been limited to after the Dems' awful year of overreach). I said, “visualize a funnel.” It really became narrowed, constricted — shrunken, shrunken to where yes, FDR and LBJ would have been ashamed and many a liberal critic (not limited to the farther militant single-payer left, either) is upset about this.
I'd like to counsel those liberals again, just be patient, see where we're at with this legislation first, that it is only incrementalism, even critics like me have said that we're heading for the Medicare or even the VA model for all of us eventually (the states may not really ever be involved in this!) and that the years are numbered for the insurers (and more importantly, the insurance model) and that they're naturally trying to survive and “thrive” as best as they can manage. Costs and insurance premiums are rising so much, so quickly that more reform is not going to be decades from now.
At this point, incidentally, I'm looking at two things.
a) Have the Dems developed a way to burst through the GOP wall repeatedly, not just for this?
b) Are the Dems going to try to overreach? Already there are ominous immigrant amnesty signs, with card check possibly to come as well as environmentalist political “climate” legislation. Bad…
“The days of quasi-socialism from the liberal lions is not the present day Democratic Party.”
This nation is mainly a center-right nation politically, rejecting the older liberalism as well as extremism, but I still see a revival of the right and while many non-liberals have many a beef about the Dems, there is a widespread resentment not limited to the far left (many “progressives” to true radicals) toward the Democrats in Washington, with the superficial criticism that they actually are being like Republicans Lite in accomodating and even serving business interests like the health insurers in the case of health care (insurance) reform, as we are being shown before our eyes now.
There's a big section of the Left that has been defied and they resent it. And it's such a large part of the population when you go past the truly far Left that the Dems are taking a risk in overlooking or defying them in large measure. (The far Left is shown with health care reform in the fraction of the public that strongly wants a public option, as much as 20-25% of the whole voting population.)
It wouldn't surprise me not only to see moderate Dems like Blanche Lincoln fall to a far Left campaign (they tried and failed against Lieberman for related reasons), but a “coup” sometime at the DLC-DNC, where you remember in the 1990s, Al From told Jesse Jackson openly once on the air that farther left liberal Dems like him had no place in the post-1994 Dem party leadership.
Replacing DINO Dems, a lib-progressive coup at DLC-DNC — there's Change you can Hope for.
“It is in many ways less than the compromise Nixon offered to Ted Kennedy, and is, as you correctly observe, the step-child of Massachusetts Romneyism.”
We'll see what happens with this. What can we anticipate, suspect, or fear?
* Anthem shows part of the obvious future, with or without reform. While many were angry at it (being in California, a “celebrity” case nation-wide, as I suspected it might become), it wasn't just a case of excess profit, corporate jets, lavish bonuses, all that — there was a problem many needed to pay attention to and didn't; the individual market's costs were rising, leading healthier, younger people in that market to leave, resulting in increased rises in costs among the remaining people.
Will costs rise in the individual market beyond affordability limits with or without subsidies?
* Employers aren't obliged to provide health insurance, obviously. Will this induce many to dump their employees on the public exchange(s) or onto the individual market now that any “moral” or “ethical” issue is resolved by the existence of (legal or technical) availability for everybody outside the work world?
* Employers may keep insurance as a benefit, but what will happen to costs?
* What will happen to the costs, and affordability, in the state high risk pools?
etc.
Don't be surprised if some commentators soon start reporting what they've found in Massachusetts.