Obaminable Care

It’s not like we don’t need universal access to healthcare. Clearly, having such a system cannot, will not and has not destroyed our country or any of the other dozens and dozens of developed nations that have already deployed similar or even more benefit-laden programs. We spend around 17% of our GDP for the most expensive per capita healthcare system in the world, one that creates economic windfalls for insurers and pharmaceutical companies who have carefully pushed direct government providers off to the side, making sure their profits remain among the highest returns in the global marketplace (of comparable entities). And we have a system that until now could not deliver affordable services to a massive number of citizens, one that resulted in tons of medical bankruptcies and unnecessary suffering and death from folks who slipped between the cracks.

The Affordable Care Act is seriously flawed, but there is nothing that cannot be fixed if there is a willing Congress to face facts. The House clings to the belief that there is still time to bring the entire system down, because once it embeds into our economy, it will soon be impossible to push out. They are beginning to see the cracks in the system they need to kill the bill, even as there are amendments from Democrats to allow people to keep the plans they have if they choose… The GOP may just agree that the Affordable Care plan needs to be amended… out of existence.

If you go back to the press clippings of the late 1950s and early 1960s in Canada, you will see that conservatives in that country used every single argument that our right wing is using today against healthcare reform. They too said universal healthcare would destroy Canada. They too said it was too much government intrusion into private and personal lives, socialism they called it. And just about every politician who embraced government-provided healthcare (much more of government expense than anything we have) was pushed out of office in the ensuing elections. Today, Canadians are more likely to give up ice hockey than their healthcare system. Go figure, and you know that someday, that we will probably feel the same way about our system and baseball!

Indeed, if President Obama were running right now, his rather complete failure to implement a viable system, the crash of the Website that really cannot be fully repaired by the end of November and his rather startling responses of “I didn’t know” to questions about his signature program, even of NSA spying conducted under his nose, would send him packing. The big misinformation – you can keep the plan you have – would only accelerate his departure.

Some of the assumptions that underlie the statute remain suspect, such as the notion of young people who have never had a serious medical issue and feel totally invulnerable, would sign up in droves for a program that effectively uses their enrollment cash to subsidize everyone else.  The marginal sign-ups for the new program suggest otherwise, even though the technical glitches probably account for most of the reluctance to enroll in the new programs. A functional program, such as the California alternative, is signing up thousands of new enrollees daily.

For most of the world, having genuine access to healthcare that works is a national goal. To the center and the left, it is a goal here too. For the right, they cannot justify one segment of society supporting those at the bottom or even the middle of the economic spectrum on this issue, and they cannot accept a system that skips over the profit-incentive in the private sector. If some must suffer or die, that’s just tough. Life’s not fair. Yet, we know we’re going to implement healthcare reform one way or the other. The old conservatives are being flooded away in a demographic shift that will sooner or later marginalize this resistance.

But we have an opportunity to fix this statute now, begin the reform that should be focused on both universal access and driving down the cost of our dysfunctional healthcare system. Our costs are fully one third higher than the nation with the second most expensive per capita plan (Switzerland), and our cost structure is completely arbitrary – varying wildly from region to region, hospital to hospital for the same treatments and procedures.

Even the President is proposing an immediate fix to be voted on by the Congress: “[T]he president’s plan said that the fix would allow insurance companies to renew plans that do not meet the higher standard of the new health care law for a year for existing policyholders, though they would be required to notify the policy holder of alternative available coverage options, as well any benefits they might lose by staying on their existing plan.

“The president’s proposal would apply only to people who have had their existing policies already cancelled — those currently without insurance would not be able to buy these old plans, said the lawmaker, who declined to be identified discussing the proposal before the president’s announcement…State insurance commissioners would have the right to override the administrative proposal.” New York Times, November 13^th. Great, and if Democrats want to embrace that and still blame the president for the mistakes, ok!

Obama may be the sacrificial lamb, and if that’s what it takes, ultra-laming a lame duck president, so be it. Let our Democratic Congress-people join with the GOP in distancing themselves from the failed elements of Obamacare… BUT FIX WHAT’S WRONG AND GET ON WITH GOVERNING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! It ain’t brain surgery, and the solutions are rather obvious. Get her done!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is really getting tiring dealing with the most dysfunctional government we have had since the Civil War.