by Senator Will Espero
District 20
Fourteen thousand Americans lose their insurance coverage every day and the next could be you. Americans spend $5000-$6000 more on health care each year than do citizens in countries that have a national health service. Fifteen per cent of Americans, 46 million, have no coverage at all. Tens of thousands of persons have had their coverage canceled – many denials resulting in death — because insurance companies search medical records to find reasons to cancel policies when patients actually need treatment. Under the current system, choice is curbed and care is restricted: treatment must be by a “participating provider,” a “covered benefit,” “medically necessary” as determined by the utilization review department, and under a “cap.”
The model adopted by Congress will be an American plan, ensuring freedom of choice. It will be easier to buy and pay for insurance and get the care you need. Under the plans in Congress, insurance companies will no longer be able to cancel your insurance in case of a crisis at a time when you are most vulnerable and most frightened. Insurance companies will no longer be able to deny eligibility for pre-existing conditions or place an arbitrary cap on the care you need in a given year or over a lifetime. Finally routine, preventive care will be provided because it’s the most affordable way to keep people healthy. It will not be a government takeover. Individual choice will be retained. If you like your plan, you can keep it; if you like your doctor, you can keep him or her. Government will not meddle in your health care but neither will the insurance company bureaucrats who profit by denying you care and canceling your policy when you need it after you have paid thousands when you didn’t need it.
Under the proposed reform, the government will oversee and provide the financing and people will continue to retain the freedom to receive care from the providers. This is the same approach Congress has taken with our other single payer systems: Medicare, Medicaid, and the military retirees / dependents /veterans system. The draft proposals in Congressional are the result of the collaborations undertaken by leaders in the field – insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, medical device manufacturers, and other providers – to provide $2 trillion in savings over the next 10 years. The final language is being worked on.
Grandma is safe. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. No one is pulling the plug on anyone’s grandparents, or the disabled, either. It is hard to believe that people would allow themselves to be scared by such misrepresentation when Social Security since 1935 has made sure our elders have an income for basic living needs, and Medicare and Medicaid has since 1965 made sure our elders and disabled have medical care, including care homes. There are simply no “death panels” in the health care proposals being considered in Congress.
Learning from Our Own Experience and Our Neighbors Abroad
Medicare, a single payer system for our elderly, has been ensuring access to health care since 1965. The program is largely successful, despite its problems. Medicare’s administrative costs are less than half those of private care. Thanks to Medicare and Medicaid, seniors, disabled persons, and the poor have access to the medical care they need.
The national health systems of our western neighbors – Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and western Europe, have also been largely successful. Citizens in those countries have the assurance that they will get the treatment, medicines, and supplemental care they need. That is the reason those programs retain huge levels of public support and produce better health care outcomes at much lower cost than ours. The public support for nationalized health care in European countries has been so strong that no Western nation that has it has ever switched to a private model (the U.S. model) with the disastrous exception of Israel.
The Public Option
Opponents argue that the public option will drive private insurers out of business. This is simply not true. Parents still choose to send their children to the many, flourishing private schools and universities rather than sending them to public school or universities. FedEx and UPS still operate even though the US Postal Service delivers packages for much less. People still pay to be members of private recreation facilities even though they can use public parks.
The government does many things well such as infrastructure (interstate highways; seaports; airports; electricity in rural areas where private utility companies won’t go); scientific research; military operations; postal service; education and libraries; and provision of services such as sanitation, water supply, rescues and emergency response, and the like. Government provides services that are too critical to be put at risk by turns in the business cycle or that serve the needs of the population as a whole. We’re not alone. Nearly every country relies on its government to provide similar basic services. The “free market” should not take over public functions as reform opponents claim; it leaves people at risk.
People not only accept government provided services without saying their rights have been taken away, or that the services will be rationed, or rendered at a lesser quality than the market will provide it — they expect those services. It’s a wonder that with all the comforts we take for granted in our daily lives because of government-provided services that people still feel apprehensive about health care reform.
As President Obama told a town hall meeting in Montana, you can’t say “I hate government programs but keep your hands off my Medicare.” Medicare is a government program. So is Social Security. I doubt that there any seniors who want their social security check to stop coming in the mail.