I haven’t done this for awhile, but I decided to post the health-care rant I’ve been working on at Alternet PEEK. Go give it some love. I will probably cross-post it here and a couple of other places tomorrow. I’m not hearing anyone else plainly say how radical and untested the “conservatives'” cockamamie “consumer-driven” idea really is, so I’m trying to get the word out.
The Mahablog
Politics. Society. Group Therapy.
Nice work. The very phrase “consumer-driven” makes my blood boil. If it were really consumer-driven, we’d be talking single payer, and tell the insurance company parasites to find another line of work.
Not mentioned is how those free-market lovin’ Republicans are terrified at the thought of their precious insurance companies having to compete with the “hopelessly inefficient” government plan Obama proposes.
Of course one of the major disappointments is how the whole single payer approach, the conservative approach, as you point out, with all its support, has been shut out of the debate, by none other than Team Obama.
I think the single payer option is on the table. Just not yet…
unless my memory is faulty, which is certainly possible, there are over 3 million people employed in the health care industry in this country. To go to single payer would unemploy many of them in a hurry.
That may be why we have to go in incremental steps. Again, I could be wrong…
Excellent article-I’ve given it a recommend.
Great Post! Fine writing! Clear thinking! Draws a neat circle around the ‘radical’ GOP approach to health-care & the inherent drawbacks & fallacies within. The ideas in this post deserve all the circulation you can give them; and this is the time to get those ideas in circulation. Who was the chair of the committee that met last week in DC on health care? How do we get this to him/her?
c u n d gulag
Many of the 3 million people who are employed by insurance companies are highly skilled professional who could go back to practicing health care as nurses, doctors and other allied professions. The administrative personnel would be retrained in the health profession or other work they might like better. Also, the single payer system is not going to run itself, some administration will be needed so some of the unemployed would be rehired by the public system. The current bill in the House called HR 676 takes 15 years to put in place and retraining is a part of the bill. Buying out insurance companies and other for profit pieces of the system is there also. The basic question is ‘can we trust the Corporate CEO and share holder with financing health care or elected official accountable to the citizen. ‘ We have had some valuable lessons in making a wise choice here. I just hope we can learn how hard it is to for the public sector to regulate and oversee people whose main objective is to make money, lots of money and more every year.
One more thing, if single payer is to be on the table, we are going to have to demand that it is on the table.
I suspect that since we’ve been operating as a fascist state – large corporations become extensions of government and government authority becomes centralized (in our case the executive branch behemoth which controls our law enforcement, the military, economic policy, education, the environment and most other aspects of national life) for at least 30 years, removing private insurance mega-corporations from the health care business will be next to impossible.
When mega-corps are forced to axe their employee health insurance programs in order to compete in the market – or even to keep their doors open – millions of people will suddenly be without health insurance and start to scream bloody murder. (I’ve read that it’s this group who is adamantly against any changes being made to what now exists.) Great article maha.