Obama Cares

While the U.S. House of Representatives sits around wasting time debating a repeal of the health care overhaul, their constituents are getting sick and are unable to seek treatment because they have no health insurance. At least not until they have to be treated in an emergency room, where they can’t be turned away. Since the repeal has no chance being enacted, the representatives are piddling away time that could be better spent addressing the real problems and issues.

Instead, they choose to engage in political grandstanding and misinformation that rises to the level of propaganda on a grand scale. They use carefully scripted words and phrases (“Obamacare”, “job-killing”, “government power grab”, “takeover of health care”) that have no basis in reality. Unless they live on a planet where the sky is green and the truth is less important than a sound bite.

I’m lucky in that I have good health coverage, and it’s Aetna that determines the level of care I get, not the government. No one has taken over my health care, other than in that the insurance company can’t charge me for certain basic health services. That’s the “government takeover”.

And I think to only impact on jobs might be that hospitals might need fewer people in the ER, treating others less fortunate than me for something that a GP might have been able to treat before a problem became acute. And that’s not a bad thing: many hospitals would love to re-assign that particular staff to other duties. There is shortage of workers in most health care fields.

With costs to both insurers and the federal and state governments skyrocketing, the House should be talking about how to cut those costs. Study after study has shown that it’s cheaper to treat someone early than to treat them in the ER or ICU when he or she is acutely ill. ER and ICU treatment costs significantly more than early intervention.

At the core, the House is hypocritical: they have government-provided health insurance. They don’t mind pushing hot buttons, but they accept health care from the same entity that wants to provide the same quality of care to people that they profess to represent. All in the name of rabble-rousing.

I lived without health coverage for over a decade, and I prayed to God that I wouldn’t get too sick. If affordable care had been available, I probably would have signed on. But it wasn’t there.

I have good coverage now, but I have to wonder what I would do if I didn’t. I would have probably lived in pain as my blood pressure slowly inched up until I came to the breaking point and ended up in the ER, either seriously ill or dead.

The reality of the health care bill is that it good on all fronts. I keep my private coverage, and people not so lucky to have it get an opportunity to get something similar. The bill will save billions and trillions of dollars as the population ages and doesn’t need as much treatment because they were treated sooner rather than later.

The benefits are self-evident: affordable preventative treatment, earlier detection of problems through health screenings, fewer acute care patients that drive costs up and a higher quality of life for those that don’t currently have access to health care.

Ignoring those benefits and the long-term savings that have been confirmed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office strikes me as a political ploy to spin the issue into oblivion on the part of the House. I would like to ask them each, individually, if they’ve ever been without coverage. That is highly unlikely, I realize.

In the mean time, they toss out words and phrases designed to scare. I doubt that many of them have seen a $204,000 medical bill. That’s reality for a major health failure. Getting sick is easy; paying for it isn’t.

Legislating a way for people without coverage to get it is in no way a takeover. And mandating coverage is no different from states mandating liability insurance for car owners. Doing so serves a greater good, a position that the Supreme Court has affirmed over and over. It has consistently ruled that the government can impose requirements that benefit and advance a greater good.

The VA, which as little as 10 years ago was a model of inefficiency and waste, has transformed itself into one of the best health care providers in the country. And they’re run by the government.

On top of everything else, ignoring that singular fact paints most opponents of reform as either stupid, uninformed or opportunistic. They either don’t know because they don’t keep up or care to, or they don’t want to see what’s staring them in the face: a model that works.

Given the rhetoric from the far and even moderate right wing, I can only surmise that their motivations are opportunistic, painting the health care reform bill as massively unpopular among the American people. In fact, most polls show that that, while opinion is divided, it carries the support of a little less than 50% of those polled by non-partisan organizations. Opponents carry similar numbers.

Those numbers in no way justify a repeal, nor do they represent an overwhelming support for repeal. Rather, it represents the number of people who either lack coverage or know someone who does.

House Republicans are fighting a war they know they have no chance of winning to get press time. It’s free advertising for the individual members when the press covers the issue as closely as it does.

The pandering to the far right and the press ignores the basic question: why is health coverage available only for a certain demographic? What if I’m self-employed or run a small business that can’t afford the extremely high cost of covering myself or a small group of employees? What do you have to offer, instead? How are you going to control health care costs that are expanding almost geometrically?

So far, the answer to the last question is “we don’t know”. The answer to the prior is “we don’t know and we don’t care”.

The current debate, if you can call it one, boils down to a cynical attempt to scare people to forward the agenda of a political party at the expense of the uninsured people they are supposed to represent.

To them, I say “shame on you”. Take you rhetoric and put it where your heart ought to be.