Mandating The Purchase of Health Insurance in America
It appears fairly likely that some kind of health care reform is going to pass Congress and be signed by the President. The real question is what are the details?
There are two criteria which must be fulfilled if the Obama health care plan is not going to be considered a failure:
(1) If twenty five million Americans still do not have health care even under the new plan, then all the work, money, and talk will have been in vain.
(2) The Obama health care reform will be a failure if it does not include a vigorous and viable “government option.” Simplistically stated this is something like where people at their own choice can choose instead of having health insurance to opt into the social security Medicare system before they reach age 65.
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The 50 million people who are not included in the current health care system are the immediate problem. This must be solved first.
On the internet earlier this week President Obama said, “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.”
Some of the people who are outside the current system have serious diseases, and are considered uninsurable under the current system because of their pre-existing illness. Some are so sick that they long ago lost their jobs. So they are now extremely poor, and they couldn’t afford to pay even modest health insurance premiums. These are people who are so poor that they are already one month behind on the mortgage payment and are worried about the electricity being shut off.
There are millions of Americans who every month have to make brutal decisions like whether to pay to natural gas bill or buy their wife’s diabetes medication or their husband’s high blood pressure pills. These people are not deadbeats like the lunatics on the right would have you believe. These are American citizens who had health insurance, good jobs, and were hard working members of society before they got sick.
If the legislators in Washington, D.C. were to pass a law demanding that these poor people buy health insurance, it would be just one baby step short of criminal. If you take this idea to its logical end, we could actually find America in a situation of serious social instability. Desperate people do desperate things.
If the new Obama Health Care Plan does not result in adequate health care coverage for these less wealthy people while retaining their dignity it will be an abject failure.
The issue of cost control and the greed of the drug companies, diagnostic clinics, hospitals, and doctors is an entirely separate issue. President Obama has been trying to solve both problems in one piece of legislation. By doing so he has made a serious miscalculation.
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