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Don’t give out a big hooray just yet since all the five bills pending in Congress include some form of public option. There is a public option and then there is a public option. Remember the story about the fox dressed up in sheep’s clothing?
What Reid now says will be in a Senate bill (assuming, of course, it gets to the floor for debate) will only cover the uninsureds, those not covered through an employer and, as noted by the founder of firedoglake last night on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, cover the sickest and most unhealthy of Americans. This is not the public option that we all need and require! HR 3200 does it a little bit better, by having a phase in for those who are covered over a period of time. Again, we need choice and competition for every single American as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, health care as a right for every single citizen will be a pipe dream.
Moreover, choice and competition have to de defined as well by eliminating the antitrust exemption the insurance industry has enjoyed since 1945. The opposite of competition is monopolization, and this industry has been monopolizing prices for insurance policies and the cost of insurance premiums for over 60 years. Rep. Conyers has introduced a bill in the House to lift this exemption, and Sens. Leahy and Schumer have done likewise in the Senate. Lifting this exemption must be in any final bill.
Another part of a real public option is to ensure that it becomes effective, or at least critical parts of it, immediately. If not, insurers will do what they can to increase costs (“preemptive gouging”) to offset revenues that any new legislation will take away. Look at the outrageous premium increases Americans are seeing in the mails this fall, as but one example. Or, we should take a clue from what the credit card companies have been doing between the time caps on credit card interest rates was passed as a law this year until the time it becomes effective in February of next year.
If we want to be like other industrialized nations that look upon health care as a right for its citizens, we have only ourselves to blame if we don’t get a public option that is . . . an option that provides all Americans with effective choice through competition.
The Right to Health Care IS a Public Option That Covers All Americans Immediately |
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| By: milesz Wednesday October 28, 2009 8:39 am | |
15 Comments
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 25.
* (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Thanks. But it seems that even the likes of a Joe Lieberman does not recognize what is universally accepted. We all have to push harder!!!
You have the right to take a dump every day, but no one is going to supply you with a potty.
If the government did try to supply all, with all of these things we would be true socialists, and the quality of what you got would be substandard.
Lets just hope for healthcare.
Is that supposed to be a joke?
“Socialism or barbarism”
That’s your choice. If you feel the people have no right to expect anything from their government then why do you “hope” for health care? OTOH if you think government should be of the people and work for the people then I see no reason to not have government issued potties if they are considered a useful way to get people what they need.
No war but class war.
But, what is the moral imperative to healthcare. It is, without it, we have not a damn thing. Without our health, we cannot be productive to ourselves, our families, our community, thw workforce and, yes, even to the country. So, how would you want to view healthcare – - – as an optional feature of life that if you are lucky enough to afford it, you get it. And if not, well, bye bye??
i don’t care about choice of insurance companies, what i want is choice of doctors, hospitals and other health care providers.
that is why single payer is the policy / system that is consistent with health care being a human right. hr 676 is universal and comprehensive health care. expanded and improved medicare for all. everyone pays a little bit in taxes so that:
every body in, no body out.
no premiums, no deductibles, no copays, no coinsurance.
doctors and hospitals compete for our business.
But if we cannot get a single payer system, then what do you want?—Insurance companies that are exempt from antitrust laws; insurance companies that are already doing “preemptive gouging” with renewals in the mails now that from small business owners have been going upwards of 47% over last year and the way to get that down is to hire younger people with no medical issues?; insurance companies that can cancel coverage due to pre-existing conditions; that can rescind coverage after you have been treated?, etc., etc.
milesz, timing is everything. If the bill with a weak PO doesn’t do anything until 2013, it ought to be voted down, since we can always try again next year. By that time the Administration and the blue dogs will be panicked, and the public will be soured over an 18 inch tall 2013 effective PO. If we go then with Medicare for All, we’ll win.
HR 676 is the best bill in Congress for health care reform, and the only one that treats it as a human right. We can’t say it often enough:
Everybody in, nobody out.
“Choice” and “competition” are not requisite features of any health care system based on human rights principles. These are just market-tested ObRahmacare buzzwords. As the Yale health policy expert Theodore Marmor said in November 2008, “It’s literally idiotic to suggest that the choice of insurance plan rather than the choice of provider is paramount in peoples’ minds.”
A Medicare-like public option available to all is worth pursuing as a potential transitional step to a genuinely profit-purged health care financing system. But now that emasculated POs have been voted out of all five committees, it’s spectacularly naive to think that a “Medicare for all who want it” PO will emerge from conference, no matter how massive the phone banking or persistent the slinkerwinkery.
“Medicare for all who want it” sets the stage for a “rush to the exits” that could precipitate a shift to single payer. Therefore, it won’t happen without a lot of people putting their bodies on the line.
I guess you practice the philosophy of the glass will remain half EMPTY, huh? The American way is competition – - – the more options the more consumers can decide what is best, and, ultimately, what prices goods and services will be at. Now, stop the complaining and get your butt in gear to make a difference. Do you want to go bankrupt in 10 years because private health insurance is too costly — because there is no tried and true competition for it?
You funny.
He is. he clearly doesn’t know who he’s talking to.
milesz, competition is the American way is bull crap.
The American way is to keep things private and try to monopolize everything. And that’s exactly what will happen if we embrace competition in health insurance again after 60 years of talking about it.
The truth is, ordinary Americans either don’t care if the insurance companies continue to exist, or simply regard them with pure hatred because of the screwing they or people they know have received at their hands. People want a choice of providers, however.
Other than that they want to be covered at as low a cost as possible. Medicare for All can do that. Private Insurance, along with an emasculated “level playing field PO” in an exchange, can’t.
It won’t happen this year. But we can go at it again next year, especially if these idiots pass the 2013 operational bill.