If the Senate passes a healthcare bill this year let’s hope it’s better than the House bill which passed two weeks ago. Much of what’s in the House bill might properly be described as “Health Deform,” the title of Carol Miller’s analysis published November 16, 2009 in The Albuquerque Journal. Miller is a long-time public health professional and health care advocate.
By Miller’s reading of the 1,990 page, complex House bill, “The legislation makes it illegal to not buy health insurance. The penalties are described in a section of the legislation called ‘Shared Responsibility.’ This will let the IRS impose a tax of up to 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income for not having health insurance.”
So the first thing about the House bill that should upset all who believe in personal responsibility and free-market principles is the mandate that everyone has to buy healthcare insurance. One way to look at that is that those of us with healthy lifestyles are supposed to pay for all the sickly people who never exercise and seem to live on cigarettes, coffee, and nutritionally worthless sugary snacks. Granted, to some extent that is already true. As I’ve stated in previous columns, we naturally feel a moral obligation to help those who fall into illness through no fault of their own. But we resent digging into our wallets to support those who choose to ruin themselves through poor diet, drug/alcohol abuse, etc. Maybe I should blame my “you don’t work, you don’t eat” Lutheran upbringing for my cold-heartedness.
Some conservatives have pulled me aside to tell me that I just don’t get it. They point to their investment portfolios in which health insurance stocks have done extremely well. That’s right, I just don’t get it: Are we talking about protecting profit or about enacting legislation to help make healthcare affordable for average Americans?
According to Miller, “If Congress does not have the courage to stand up to the private insurance industry now, it will be even more difficult in the future, especially after giving the industry trillions of new dollars through this terrible legislation. Let’s call this what it is: another corporate bailout on the backs of working people.”
Miller also states that “Congress could have defended and built up a system based on popular, high-quality government-run health programs like the military and veterans fully socialized health systems or Medicare, a single-payer program. Instead, the president and Congress let the corporations and government-haters take control of the agenda.”
If Miller is correct, things are going to get a whole lot worse—higher healthcare costs, higher taxes and higher premiums—before average Americans wake up to fact that the protection of for-profit private healthcare insurance IS the problem. If Americans would vociferously demand it, one simple legislative change could be made and it wouldn’t take 1,990 pages to do it: the implementation of a public insurance option achieved through expansion of Medicare. Yes, the House bill does include a public option and we hope and pray that profit-minded conservatives in the Senate don’t succeed in killing or castrating what is truly best for America’s working classes. My point is that a strong public option is all we really need to set us on the right course for reform.
But what we appear to be heading toward in final legislation is an opportunity for private health insurers and the pharmaceutical industries to have at least a few more years of cleaning out our wallets. Big Pharma is clearly not dragging its feet: A recent article in The New York Times by Duff Wilson explains that “In the last year, the [drug] industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent . . . That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992 . . .”
The House bill also assures that we’ll all be drowning in more paperwork, which in itself drives administrative costs higher. If you’ve been paying attention, you understand that waste from private insurance administration accounts for nearly a third of every healthcare dollar spent in America—money spent that does nothing to improve anyone’s health. Forcing more people into this bloated bureaucracy only compounds the waste. Of course, if you are on the profit end of this system it sure doesn’t seem like waste and you are happier than a pig in mud.
If the Senate bill protects a strong public option and the best features of the House bill, we will at least have taken some baby steps toward reform—but only baby steps. All in all, it looks like conservatives are the winners of round one. You might think of them next time you struggle to pay your medical bills.
Having said all of the above, I’m sure I will be criticized because it’s pretty obvious that Obama has a very, very full agenda of trying to clean up huge foreign and domestic messes left from the Bush-Cheney years. And it’s obvious that conservative obstruction from Democrats and Republicans will only allow him to accomplish just so much. All the more reason to argue that we need solid Progressive leadership—beyond baby steps—to take the country in a better direction.
Aside from the social issues, modern conservatism can now unquestionably be equated with wealthy interests first, America’s working-class interests last. Which means that in the coming elections, America will need true Progressives more than ever.
(Brad Pfeiffer of Heber Springs is one of the local contributors to Progressive Voice, a “liberal viewpoint” column which runs each Friday.)
Heber Springs, Ark. —
