Politics’ regular season has begun once again. We’ve been watching the training camp stuff all summer, and now it’s time to play for the money, I guess. I’m not great with sports analogies, so that’s as far as 
I’ll go. No, wait – I lied… President Obama had the opening pitch on Wednesday night (okay, that’s really it) and I’d say he did a pretty decent job of explaining what it is he wants to do. It doesn’t exactly comport with what I think needs to happen to bring the United States to a place where we behave like a civilized modern industrial nation, but it’s a bit clearer than it’s been up to now. While my inclination is to support this – particularly if it includes the so-called “public option” – I am a bit concerned about what this will mean for people who have no coverage at all, or just the sort of lousy coverage I used to carry years ago. I’d like to hear more about that interim period during which the uninsured receive “basic” health insurance. That seems a bit problematic, to say the least, in that it sounds like it would insure people who are more prone to illness (i.e. poor families) in the least effective and most expensive way available.
I’m here to tell you, I have had catastrophic policies before. I have also had standard individual indemnity policies. They pay for nothing. As long as you are healthy and lucky enough to remain out of the hospital, you will see not one dime out of these plans. They have enormous deductibles and don’t pay for any preventive care. From the insurer’s standpoint, that’s a great deal, if the insured doesn’t get badly ill. But if you end up in the hospital, they’re on the hook for some major medical costs – that’s why they tend to cap your benefits… to ensure that you don’t get too expensive in the throes of your misfortune. My first plan ever was a Mutual Of Omaha policy (actually, several policies) that worked like this – if you had a partially reimbursable expense (I never actually did, but it was theoretically possible), you pay for the care and they would send you a check…. eventually… maybe. It was kind of iffy, to say the least, and definitely set up to keep the money flowing in one direction – from you to Omaha.
The funny thing was, they were in the process of discontinuing this class of policy, presumably because it was not profitable. I’m not surprised, frankly. Any policy that encourages you to ignore your illnesses for as long as possible, to not receive any diagnostic care or testing, to avoid contact with health 
professionals who might actually help steer you in a positive direction (i.e. eat better, don’t smoke, etc.), is not going to have particularly good outcomes. People are going to get badly sick, discover illnesses at later stages (when treatment tends to be most expensive), and ultimately cost more than those who receive strong preventive care. That, I think, is one of the traps the Obama health plan might fall into – offering minimal care to people who can’t afford better, even though that approach eventually costs more (and creates greater misery in the process). What the hell, we are the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth. It’s a scandal that almost 50 million people have no health coverage. We need to make certain people get the right kind of care, because it’s the right thing to do. Oh, and it will save money besides.
So, hey… here’s an avid single-payer advocate saying, let’s encourage our legislators and our president to pass a bill that will help those most in need. Let’s put that stake in the ground – then we can start working on putting a stake through the heart of this ludicrous privatized health insurance scam we call a “system”.
luv u,
jp
to gain a couple of (or, more likely, just one) Republican vote(s) in the Senate – votes that would probably be superfluous without the public option anyway. At this moment, I’m hoping this was just a trial balloon put up by an increasingly pusillanimous White House, but my common sense tells me that’s not the case. The public plan was the ten-day-old soup bone tossed to the left in exchange for their acquiescence to the administration’s decision not to even discuss adopting a single payer system; so, of course, the triangulators we’ve put in charge of our government consider this expendable, just as they consider progressives a block of votes they can take for granted. Stupid move, if true. The public option is all that’s left of meaningful health insurance reform. Without that, we might as well not bother. The balance of the legislation will essentially require everyone to buy private insurance, with subsidies for those who cannot afford it, and that mandate would only benefit big fat private insurers. In fact, it would set things up so that whether the legislation passes or not, they would stand to win.
of why a national health insurance plan would tend not only provide better coverage, but actually save money… and lots of it. This is often framed as an effort to “socialize” the health care industry by having the government – and the taxpayers – pay to cover the uninsured, who are more often than not portrayed as a.) lazy, b.) irresponsible, and/or 3.) selfish – a kind of “hand out”, if you will. Here’s the part that, frankly, makes us look dumb: the government (and taxpayers) already insure the most expensive people in the country to insure, namely the elderly (Medicare) and the poor (Medicaid, S-CHIP). Extending, say, Medicare to cover everyone, including young, healthy workers, would make the system better able to pay for itself and provide better care. How good is Medicare, really? Ask mom or grandma… if she’s not too scared to talk to you because Glen Beck told her you may be a socialist.
politics tends to focus the mind, particularly during times of upheaval and uncertainty, which 1980 most certainly was. My late brother Mark, who passed away late that same year, took a keen interest in the campaign – he’d been a strong Kennedy supporter from his youngest days and particularly so with Robert Kennedy’s 1968 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mark, Matt (my Big Green compatriot) and I supported the younger Kennedy against Carter for many of the same reasons I have had for backing the more left-leaning candidates in that party since working on the McGovern campaign as a pre-teenager. But there was also that Kennedy symbolism, the notion that they represented in the minds of so many a kind of liberal ideal and inside-the-system activism strong enough to attract people who might otherwise take their place on the barricades. As far to the left as we were, we could always manage to give a Kennedy the benefit of the doubt.
which put him ahead of nearly every political figure who took the podium to eulogize him at his memorial celebration in Boston’s JFK Library. In that way, and in a number of different ways over the course of his 47 years in the Senate, he amassed a record of accomplishment that makes him the head of his family, in my book. Yes, it’s a flawed legacy, one that reflects positions with which I disagree, but he took that Kennedy myth and made it into something tangible. That in itself is worth remembering. Sadly, his best efforts and ours thus far have not been sufficient to save the lives of the more than forty American service people who’ve died in Afghanistan this month alone.