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It’s a sad day for America. It looks as if both the House and the Senate are proposing the public option (or as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi frames it, the “consumer’s option”). And, the worst part about all of this? The majority of Americans now appear to back it.
Just reading through some of the articles and commentary. it looks as if it’s mostly just the Republicans against the idea of the government competing with the private sector. For the Dems who are potentially against it, it appears that it’s not because of the concept, but because of how it would be financed. It seems that some of the Dems are finally getting some backlash against doing things that add to the national debt and other fiscal irresponsibility.
So, if this isn’t paid for just by writing IOUs, how’s it going to be done? From what I’ve seen, it looks as if it’s a combination of a number of things including: reducing Medicare fraud (which, if the government were efficient, wouldn’t be there to begin with; taxing private insurers and other health providers (only the government can set up a competitor and run it by taking money directly from the groups it’s competing with); fining employers and individuals who don’t offer or buy health insurance (which is really going to be a problem for a lot of small employers); and “negotiating” reimbursements with providers.
Does the government really ever negotiate? Won’t this result in the government just setting the rates? Evidently, some in Congress had suggested setting the rates the same as Medicare, but there was opposition to that because a few of members of Congress (maybe just the ones lobbied by hospitals and doctors) argued this was too low. Meanwhile, there are other articles coming out regularly talking about how the government was thinking about lowering Medicare payments even more next year, and that there are already a lot of doctors who have excluded or want to exclude Medicare patients because they’re losing money on them.
How is the public option not the start to inevitable socialization of health care? The government will start setting rates that are too low for providers to make money (let’s just call it what it is, an extension of Medicare). Then, the doctors and hospitals will have to start charging privately insured patients more to subsidize the government-insured patients whose charges they have no say over. This will drive up private plan costs, and more and more people will be forced to shift to the public “consumer’s” option because it’s cheaper. All the while, the government is speeding up the process by taxing the private insurers to pay for it. Arrrgggghhh!
Eventually, the government will have run all the private insurers into the ground and everyone will end up insured by the government, which means it will set the prices for every provider, which basically means all hospitals and doctors work for the government. Then, we’ll most likely end up with all the problems that Medicare is facing: rampant fraud, a fast-track to bankruptcy and reimbursement schedules that are too low that will force the doctors and hospitals to dramatically cut back on quality or risk bankruptcy. Will decent doctors even want to spend the 12 years in college and residency if it means their pay will be set by the government?
This will be the end of quality health care in America. There have been some who argue that health care in America costs more than in most other countries but isn’t any better. That’s not true. The people making that argument aren’t digging deeply enough. They only look at the total cost spent on health care in the U.S. per person and life expectancy. So, what does that miss? It misses the fact that most Americans live lifestyles that are less healthy than non-Americans to begin with. It misses the fact that in America, people are given extremely costly life-saving procedures when other countries just let those people die. And it ignores the costs of America being so litigious that if any procedure doesn’t give you the outcome you wanted, you can just sue.
DOUG KRAFT Fort Wayne
