Dan's Soapbox

Dan's views on current events, popular culture, and other topics of interest.

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Thursday, July 08, 2010

More on What's Wrong with Health Care

I feel like I'm a year late with this post, but here it goes, a follow up to a post I made a few years ago:

One of the problems with health care in this country is that no wants to seeing people dying of conditions that can be treated. As Glenn Beck glibly points out, anyone who shows up at a hospital with a life-threatening but treatable condition DOES get treated. But who pays for it? Of course we all do, but some pay more than others. This is why hospitals make ridiculous charges, like $20 for an aspirin, or a $180 "facilities fee" on top of the doctor's fee when all you did was meet with a specialist to ask some questions (this actually happened to my wife & I).

So through absurd pricing, these costs get passed to people who do have resources to pay but are not covered by insurance, and insurance companies. Who do the insurance company's pass these charges to? Not big organizations like governments or Boeing. Large organizations have lots of negotiating power. If the cost per employee is too high, they take their huge contract somewhere else. But small companies and purchasers of individual policies have little negotiating power and get the shaft.

I used to work for a company with fewer than 20 employees. Every year they had to switch insurance providers because every year the provider wanted to increase rates 10-25 percent. So every year we'd switch to different policy which cost only 2-5% more and had only slightly higher deductibles and worse coverage, awful plans compared to what employees at large employers get.

Then comes Obama, who instead of proposing single-payer like many in left wanted, proposes changes to the existing system that keep private insurance companies but attempts to fix many of problems with the current system. At the beginning of the process, as well at end, he invited the participation of Republicans in the process. But Republicans refused to cooperate, called many of the reforms in the plan they had supported in previous years "Socialist" or "taking over heal care," and even spread complete utter falsehoods like "Death Panels."

Many Republicans want "free-market" solutions to the problems, but they haven't come up with ideas that would actually work. In the case of health care, free market solutions won't work because some people just require a lot more health care than others. You wouldn't sell fire insurance to someone if you were 100 percent certain their house would burn down, right? You wouldn't sell auto insurance to someone who is unable to drive without getting in an accident, right? So in a free market, why would a health insurance company sell a policy to a person with a chronic condition they know they'll lose money on? We're OK with people just can't drive safely not being allowed to drive (and so they don't need auto insurance), but we're not OK with people dying of curable conditions.

So if you don't want people dying because they can't pay, if you don't want middle class people selling their homes or cashing out their retirements to pay for a medical emergency or expensive chronic condition, and if you're not confident that charities have the means to cover all of them, then you have to come up with some way of "redistributing the wealth" to pay for it, hopefully one that doesn't make individuals and small companies pay disproportionally for it.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Yes, Health Care is in the Constitution!

Over the past year, one of the Conservative rallying cries about health care reform has been "The Constitution doesn't give government the power to provide health care!"  Well does it?

I've been reading the U.S. Constitution, and Article I, Section 8, which spells out the powers of Congress, states:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States...

So Congress has the Power to provide for the common defense and general welfare.  What does welfare mean in this context?   Probably not the way modern Americans use the word as a label for government assistance for the poor.   Dictionary.com offers the following definition for "welfare":

1. the good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity, etc., of a person, group, or organization; well-being: to look after a child's welfare; the physical or moral welfare of society.

Glenn Beck & Co. love to portray liberalism and progressivism as the antithesis of the Constitution.   It is not.  Not only does the Constitution say nothing about religion (other than a ban on official recognizance or prohibition), it also says nothing about how the economy should be run.   The Constitution guards against tyranny, not progressivism.  Despite what Beck & Co. say, they are not the same thing.

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