I’m sure everybody’s heard the old joke that goes along the lines of "Your ideal spouse: Rich, Educated, Beautiful. Choose Two" or "Computer software: Fast, Easy, Affordable. Choose Two". No matter how much we want everything, it’s almost impossible to find something that has every positive aspect you are looking for. The same goes for health care reform.
PoliticsHealth careSeptember 16, 2009
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Yesterday Julia and I had the exciting pleasure of volunteering at President Obama’s first White House rally at the Target Center in Minneapolis to argue for health care reform. We we asked to volunteer on Wednesday shortly after the visit was announced, and we jumped at the chance. Following a training session on Friday night, where we learned that we would be volunteer captains for the VIP section on the floor of the Target Center close to the podium, the rally left us tired, sore, and fired up. Here are a few of our experiences at that rally…
PoliticsBarack Obama, Health care, Julia Miller, Target CenterSeptember 13, 2009
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If we are to have serious health care reform in this country, it will require everybody to have coverage. Universal coverage isn’t just a nicety, or “the right thing to do”, it’s an essential. Without it, real reform won’t be harder; it will, quite simply, be impossible.
The reason is purely economic, and revolves around the other reforms that people seem to take for granted: preventing insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, and preventing insurance companies from rescinding existing coverage due to new illnesses, “technicalities” on the application, and other invented, generally evil reasons. These common insurance industry practices, the ones that lead to big bonuses for insurance company employees that find ways to drop expensive customers, are rightly seen as inhumane, and people assume that any health reform would put an end to them. But in order for that to happen, you absolutely need mandated, universal coverage.
It’s quite simple really: if you don’t mandate coverage, people will choose not to buy insurance until they get sick. Then, since insurance companies can’t deny coverage to anybody, and they can’t cancel coverage, the insurance company will have to pay for all future medical care, despite the consumer not paying any premiums before that point. Sure, the consumer may be on the hook for anything that happened before coverage started, for for chronic conditions like diabetes, there’s plenty of expenses that will come later. The customer saves money, and the insurance company goes under because they can’t recoup the cost of coverage through premiums.
It would be no different than allowing people to buy auto insurance after an accident, or to buy life insurance after they are already dead, with the insurance companies being forced to issue the policy. That’s a fantastic way to put all insurance companies out of business, but not a terribly good way to ensure the long-term health of the industry.
Thus, you need to force people to buy into the system from the beginning, so that they don’t game the system by waiting to purchase insurance. The best way to do that, however, is the question. I don’t think a fine, up to $3,800 as suggested by Sen. Max Baucus, is the way to do it. My preference would be that anybody who does not have other insurance would be automatically enrolled and billed for the public option (yet another reason why a public option is essential). That’s not a fine, that’s just being nudged into a default plan and paying for it.
No matter how you do it, though, mandatory universal coverage is essential if we hope to do away with the worst of insurance company excesses.
PoliticsHealth careSeptember 09, 2009
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The health care debate is generating a lot more heat than light these days, and I’m somewhat puzzled as to why. Only somewhat puzzled, though, because much of what is going on was accurately predicted long before this issue even came up, and in fact has been the norm for years. What we are seeing is the consequence of events that happened thirty or forty years ago, still having a huge impact today. The sad result is that people are so far apart, it’s hard to know if that gap can even be bridged.
PoliticsHealth careAugust 15, 2009
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Ten years ago, I bought a standard glass tube TV with a single coax input. Today, I have an LCD flat-screen TV with more inputs than I can use.
Ten years ago, my car didn’t even have airbags. Today, cars come with all sorts of safety devices.
Ten years ago, my computer had 32 MB of RAM and a 300 MB hard drive. Today, I have half a terabyte of storage and a quad-core processor that can handle anything I throw at it.
Ten years ago, what’s a DVD player? Today, not only are DVD players a commodity, but I could have BluRay if I wanted.
I just took a week-long trip to Colorado on a plane, stayed in a nice hotel, and rented a car, and I am by no means rich.
You can walk into just about any fast-food joint and get a (admittedly unhealthy) full meal for a few bucks.
Ten years ago, my cell phone had crappy service and a two-line, monochrome dot matrix display. Today, the service isn’t quite as crappy, but my phone sure looks a lot better.
Not to mention the fact that cell phone, computer, internet, and broadband market penetration is much higher now than ten years ago, among other things.
The point of this isn’t that we’ve had great technological advances, although we have. The point is that for the most part, all of these new advances come to us at the same cost, or even cheaper, than they were not too long ago. In a huge number of arenas, the free market has worked to give us better products at less cost. The market can and has worked wonders.
So maybe, just maybe, if you look at health care, where there are more uninsured people today than ten years ago, and health care costs more than it did back then…perhaps the free market just isn’t working so well in this area.
PoliticsCapitalism, Health careJuly 21, 2009
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In recent days, there seems to be a crescendo in the commentary from people warning the Obama administration and Congress about being too quick to compromise to get some kind of grand “bipartisan” health care reform that will attract Republican votes. This view is dead-on. While there are some things that must be compromised on, there are also some very basic tenets (like the public option) that must survive, no matter who is unhappy with it.
PoliticsHealth careJune 24, 2009
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In my last post, I talked about how health care is not a free market. In this post, I get into the “public option” in the health care reform debate: the government health insurance plan that will exist alongside current private insurance products, giving people another option when getting insurance. It is no exaggeration to say that the success of any health care reform depends on the existence of a public option; without one, there will be no reform.
PoliticsHealth careJune 20, 2009
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Health care reform is one of the hottest topics around Washington these days, because it is such a critical issue. That the health care system in the U.S. is broken few people doubt. There are around 50 million uninsured people in this country, we pay far, far more per capita than any other industrialized country on health care, and our outcomes are generally worse. We aren’t living the longest, we don’t have the lowest infant mortality rates, we aren’t curing everything. How we got to this point is not really important now; what’s important is how we fix it.
PoliticsHealth careJune 18, 2009
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A couple weeks ago I went to the dentist, and although I didn’t have any pain or other issues, my dentist found the beginnings of a small cavity. I went in a week later to have it filled; less than an hour later I was on my way. A short time later, I got my bill for $150 (which, when I thought about it, seems like a really good deal). My insurance paid for the majority, I paid the rest, and that was it.
All in all, it’s a pretty mundane story. Hardly worth even mentioning, you’d think. But taking a closer look at the pieces, it’s not unremarkable at all. I’m very fortunate that I can engage in such a transaction so easily at so little cost to me; for countless people, that just can’t happen, and the distance between my situation and theirs is not as great as one would think.
PersonalGAMC, Health care, Insurance, PawlentyMay 18, 2009
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