I'm not sure if it is the fact that I'm no longer in college spending my out-of-class time being an activist, or the fact that I'm fighting a deadly disease that leads insurance companies to routinely drop fellow lyme patients or deny coverage of our treatment, but I'm fed up with how healthcare reform is being handled thus far by our elected officials.
For starters, healthcare is a serious issue in our country today. Despite the facts that opponents claim that we have the best healthcare in the world that is beyond the necessity of reform. For the sake of argument, let's agree. We'll ignore the fact that in the World Health Organization rankings of the health systems, we rank 37th, just one ahead of Slovenia, and we'll ignore the fact that we are the last developed country in the world without a universal healthcare system that covers every citizen. We spend more money on healthcare than any other country with more than one-third going to insurance bureaucracy, while the majority of bankruptcies are due to the costs of medial bills. We's also have ignore that this is a system that denies care to 47 million people, which amounts to about fifteen percent of out population. Of those, 45,000 will die each year because of it.
But the uninsured aren't the only ones affected by our lack of healthcare reform. An estimated 25 million of those with insurance are considered underinsured -- a sixty percent increase from 2003 -- with over half going without necessary care because of costs. The majority of the underinsured choose not to fill certain prescriptions, see a specialist, or get preventative care like mammograms.
If this really represented the greatest healthcare in the world, what is so great about it? Why would we rejoice in a system that only works for part of the population at the expense of the rest? What part of the above statistics suggest that we would be better off leaving it alone?
Leaving the Democrats out for a second, (believe me, I'll get back to them), I'm shocked by the Republicans clear and resounding 'no' to anything around healthcare reform. I'm not surprised that they have a differing opinion from Democrats, but I'm disturbed by their lack of an reasoned opinion that brings a discourse to the plan. We've heard about Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin's ubiquitous death panels, somehow taken out of the supposed evil idea of covering end-of-life counseling with one's doctor; mandatory abortion coverage, despite explicit language stating that abortions would not covered; Joe "You Lie" Wilson helped to popularize the myth that healthcare would cover illegal immigrants despite a bill that explicitly states the opposite; and Michele Bachmann's latest dose of crazy: abortion field trips because of funding for school clinics.
This has been the Republican response to healthcare reform: outright lies that I naively thought were too crazy to work when I first heard of the death panels scare tactic. This nonsense has dominated the conversation from town hall meetings, news and commentary, and even within the Senate. Part of the point of having a two-party system is the ability to talk, debate, and compromise in order to bring out the best of legislation. However, there is no debate here; there isn't even real discussion. Instead of alternatives, Republicans have used scare tactics like "death panels" and "mandatory abortions," not because they believe they are true, but because that is the easiest way to manipulate people through fear.
The only alternative healthcare reform a few Republicans have mentioned is a measly four-page plan for opening up health insurance companies across state lines. While this may be slightly helpful despite the fact that it doesn't regulate any part of the health insurance companies to stop them from denying people coverage for pre-existing conditions or dropping people when they get sick. But we don't even get to hear about the Republican alternative because instead of fighting for a different reform, they are fighting to stall, generate fear, and ultimately squash any chance at reform.
Why isn't this political suicide? Republicans should be outraged that their elected officials are trying to score political points by trivializing the the work of this amoral system called managed care that maims and kills our citizen without regulation, all for greed of massive profits. We should be ashamed that in our so-called "greatest country in the world," we still support a business that profits off of denying care that leaves millions without any care and millions more with limited care that may only become apparent when they are in need of it.
Matt Kapp of Vanity Fair founds that CEO's at the biggest health insurance companies average $12. million a year, which is two-thirds higher than salaries in Wall Street and is the highest of any industry. In total, health insurance companies make $200 billion a year, pouring in $170 million in campaign contributions last year alone, $263 million in the past six months. They also spend more than any other other industry on lobbying, averaging 6 healthcare lobbyists per member of Congress. Like typical business, this system seeks to maximize profits while minimizing expenses. But what we like to gloss over is the fact that those expenses are people, their money and sometimes their lives. Real healthcare reform in something like a single-payer system would shift the focus from corporate greed to the care of our fellow citizens. The healthcare reform we are looking at today, government option or not, adds some regulation and oversight to protect sick people in certain situations. Some degree of reform is vital even though an overhaul of the system is what is ideally needed to shift priorities from profits to the care of people.
Because of this, it doesn't much effort to point out that our healthcare system could use some tweaking or expanding to make it better. Even my most ardent gun-touting, anti-liberal, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck-loving relatives have numerous stories about how they or someone they know has struggled for medical coverage and to pay for medical bills. Instead of supporting reform that would benefit them, they are hesitant because they have been feed fear and lies from across the Republican spectrum. The politics of 'no' are impeding progress and just may sink support for any moderate/independents left in the already fractured party.
We had an opportunity to move us into the same category of the rest of the developed world. We had the option to put in a single-payer, universal healthcare option on the table. But in an effort to court Republicans in spite of their strident opposition to working with Democrats on anything, single payer was compromised into a public option (keyword: option) that gives individuals the choice of a government-covered health plan if they are denied insurance or cannot afford it The rest of us may keep ours without change, unless reform comes with regulation like preventing insurance companies from denying people over pre-existing conditions.
Since this was introduced, Republicans have off and ran with stoking fears about socialism that led far-right "tea-partiers" to compare President Obama to Hitler. They come out in droves to healthcare town hall meetings only to scream about death panels, conspiracies about President Obama being a secret Muslim and secret Kenyan with a life-long plot to become president of a country he wasn't a citizen of, and bringing loaded guns declaring "2nd Ammendment rights" while acting shocked that others may perceive a threat. Outright lies, misinformation, and fear-mongering took place while Democrats seemed to stay silent. Perhaps it was shock, or not knowing what to do, but that silence was powerfully deafening.They decided to put everything on the table to be compromised; and in Republican terms, that would mean discarded. By the time President Obama spoke out to save the much needed public option, it felt like it was too little too late.
We may still have some sort of a public option and some sort of reform, but it feels so hard to have hope these days. Republicans are guaranteed to filibuster, which means Democrats will need 60 votes to defeat it. But with "Blue Dog" [more realistically: "Blue Cross"] Democrats like Max Baucus who has reeled in $3,902,785 from Big Pharma, hospitals, and insurance companies, it is not much of a stretch to see why he seems to have put little effort into working for reform. Aside from the recent passion expressed by Rep. Alan Grayson, I have to wonder, where are the progressives? Where are the ones willing to fight for reform? With the way Democrats have been acting of late, the American people could easily be forgetting they elected the largest Democrat-controlled Congress in 30 years. This may one of the most important votes to happen in our lifetimes, it would be great to know that the lives of our fellow Americans weren't being used as political bargaining chips or overlooked altogether.
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