Terry Kendrick - June 26, 2009
Health Care Reform Principles
With so much talk about Health Care Reform but not much action or commitment to specific principles, I’m finding this discussion to be a bit like Chinese Water Torture and am concerned that people will just give up or give in because they run out of steam.
I yelled at the ABC anchor Charles Gibson at the White House town meeting this past Wednesday evening because his questions made me nuts. One of the questions was something about the majority of people not supporting a public option and being happy with the way things are. Who is he talking to? Polls consistently show that people in the U.S. want major changes in the way health care is bought and paid for in this country. They want a public option. It’s only politicians and the insurance companies who are happy with the status quo.
Besides, people may like their current health care plans (if they are lucky enough to have one) vs. being uninsured, but ask them a follow-up question, are you concerned that your premiums will be too expensive for you to afford in the near future?
We need to bring the focus of the debate back to basic values. Do we want health care to be accessible and available to everyone or don’t we? Will we invest in making sure that we have a high quality health care system or won’t we?
Think of the people you know who don’t feel they can leave their jobs because they’d lose their health insurance. People are making fundamental decisions about the quality of their lives based on whether or not their employer provides health insurance coverage. Would people make different decisions about their employment, their lives if they weren’t afraid of losing their insurance?
Can you imagine saying to your child or grandchild. Follow your dreams, be anything that you want to be, but make sure the job provides health insurance. If you want to find out where the devil lives, it’s not only in the details but in the overarching decisions we’ve made for our lives.
I particularly liked President Obama’s point in his press conference on Monday about insurance companies fearing that a government run program would be unfair competition while on the other hand; they feel the government can’t run anything.
He called the reasoning illogical. I call it disingenuous. Insurance companies know that if people had any other option, they’d leave their current plans like fleas jumping off a dead dog.
At a recent Congressional hearing, representatives from three large insurance companies were asked if they would accept ending their practice of rescission in health care reform legislation. They all said no.
This practice means that when a person files a claim, let’s say they have cancer, the insurance company goes back over all their paperwork and looks into all their medical records to see if there is any reason they can deny coverage. The person can have been covered for years and this isn’t a pre-existing condition, it doesn’t matter. If the company determines there is any inconsistency, they can rescind the policy.
And, these are the people we want to make sure don’t get their feelings hurt in this reform process. I truly don’t get it.
If that weren’t enough to contend with, we have centrist Democrats doing everything they can to appease insurance companies by telling their constituents, that they are the problem or that we need bi-partisanship compromise in order to pass health care reform. Let Republican Congress members be shown for who they really are. The electorate will remember who stood up for them and who didn’t. If Republicans value corporate interests over the American people; let the chips fall where they may.
Health care reform will always be seen as a Democratic initiative. If one passes that actually benefits real people’s lives, Democrats will reap the rewards at the voting booth for years to come. But if Congress passes some mealy-mouthed modest proposal that does too little too late, Democrats will be left holding the bag and the blame and they’ll deserve it.
This is Terry Kendrick, thanks for listening.
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