Yesterday, in a post about private health insurers cherry-picking and misrepresenting polling data to prevent the passage of health care reform in Congress, I wrote the following:
Here is the bottom line: Every one of the dire scenarios being predicted by the private insurance lobby and their friends in Congress for a public health care option is already happening — and worse, has been going on for decades already. We are facing — have been facing, for many years — a crisis in our ability to provide health care, both in terms of availability and cost, that is staggeringly serious. Those lawmakers in Congress, both Republican and Democratic, who are suggesting that their operatives “do anything to slow down health care reform,” who are trying to kill the reform package now ready to be voted on, who want to “start from scratch” in the fall, when there will be “plenty of time” to come up with something more acceptable to the private insurance industry and big business in general, are being incredibly irresponsible. Inaction right now is worse than imperfection.
This morning, I saw this op-ed, by Washington Post business columnist, Steven Pearlstein, titled “Imperfect Health Reform Still Beats the Status Quo.” Here are the first few paragraphs:
Among the range of options for health-care reform, there’s one that is sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant.
That’s the option of doing nothing, letting things continue to drift as they have for the past two decades as we continue to search in vain for the perfect plan that would let everyone have everything they want and preserve everything they already have while getting someone else to pay for it.
So the next time you hear someone throwing a hissy fit because health reform might raise taxes on some people, or steer people into managed care, or require small businesses to contribute $2 a day for each employee’s coverage, just remember to ask yourself: And that’s compared with what?
Ezra Klein has the transcript of an interview from earlier today in which Nancy Pelosi said that “health-care reform would pass the House and that it would include a public plan.”
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