Health Care Politics That Make One Sick

Having been here a couple of weeks, and seeing lots of the dueling TV health care ads (and other arguments), yours truly remains baffled by three issues constantly raised:

1) With a federal option, private health cover will vanish.

As this blog has pointed out, that is nonsense.  In a free society, just because there is a state sector does not mean there is not necessarily a private one functioning concurrently.  Money will NEVER be removed from health care.

2) When there is federal coverage, government bureaucrats would come between you and your doctor.

Another misunderstanding.  In fact, it is rather m0re likely an insurance company bureaucrat would.  After all, he has to make a profit.  Government doesn’t.

3) “70 percent polled,” we are told, are happy with their health care, so doesn’t that somehow mean the issue should go away?

As if that matters?  If one asks those “70 percent” how they would feel if they lost the health cover we are told they now are so satisfied with, we see where the base problem lies: that affordable health cover is tied to one’s job.

What remains unaddressed overall is where precisely it appears in the Constitution, that a group plan based on what your employer provides through your job, should be how you get affordable health cover?  It was wrong to have allowed that approach to become the cornerstone of the U.S. coverage system starting in the 1940s.  And it is wrong that it should remain so, given that business can simply no longer afford it.

Case in point: a small businessman friend who has preferred to “pay as he goes” (“Live free or die,” one might say) rather than cough up exorbitant premiums, recently got a rude shock.  Lacking membership in a group plan, when his newborn daughter developed complications early this year, the hospital took care of her of course.  And then up and presented him with a bill, he told us, for — yes, really — $150,000 as if he were being billed for buying groceries.

He responded flat out that they were “smoking crack” if they thought he, or nearly anyone, had that sort of money.  They threatened to send it to collection.  He told them to feel free: he didn’t have it.  They went back and forth for several months, until finally they agreed to accept far less.

And what happened to the need for the $150,000?  Who knows.  As he finished fuming, yours truly could only say to him, “I know.  Don’t get me started on U.S. health care, please.”  His frustration was clear and utterly understandable.  “I’ve paid taxes for Medicare and for Medicaid for years,” he vented, “but we aren’t eligible for those.  And when my daughter needs something, we get nothing!  Nothing but a huge bill!  It’s enough to make me want to fold up the business and just stop working too.”

Exactly.  We don’t have the likes of GM providing schools.  Nor should GM and other businesses be providing health care, and in doing so, subsidizing astronomical costs.  The 1940s-1950s model is dead.  A new one is urgently necessary.

This blog will not stop noting this.  And it will not stop proclaiming that it should not be allowed to become a Democrat issue.  One can be a conservative and support universal health care.

[Posted 8:25 PM, July 9, NY time.]