Tag Archives: health insurance

Bi-partisan Moral Grandeur

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In this clip from Lawrence O’Donnell’s Last Word, President Obama explains his centrist ways to a group of school kids and takes Clintonian-type rationalizations to bizarre configurations by saying, in essence, that he’s Lincoln, compromising on the issue of slavery in the The Emancipation Proclamation to “win the war and to maintain the Union.” Seriously. Watch.

(Psst, Mr. President…Lincoln effectively split the country and drove it to war over the issue of slavery and, in the process, transformed us from a reprobate nation).

Now it’s possible that I may be under-appreciating the great transformational accomplishments of saving the banking industry and giving everyone the right to buy health insurance and compelling them to do so but, either way, this can beg only one question: is this dude losin’ it?

Keep your government hands off my Medicare (part deux)

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Let’s cut YOUR stuff, not mine:

…[W]hen given a straight-up choice between broad spending cuts and tax increases, Americans say they would prefer to reduce the deficit mostly through less spending. It’s not even close: 62 percent for spending cuts, 29 percent for tax increases.

Republicans long ago succeeded in framing the debate around deficits because tax increases were “assumed” to be evil.

But wait…there’s more:

A few questions later, though, our pollsters offered a different choice. Would people rather eliminate Medicare’s shortfall through reduced Medicare benefits or higher taxes?

The percentages then switch, becoming nearly a mirror image of what they had been. Some 64 percent of respondents preferred tax increases, while 24 percent chose Medicare cuts. The same is true of Social Security: 63 percent for higher taxes, 25 percent for reduced benefits.

Don’t hold your breath: the richest 1% already got a two-year, guaranteed tax cut so, really, there’s nowhere to go on THIS until THAT gets ironed out.

But there is reason for optimism because the American people do have common sense:

When Americans are given a set of realistic choices, they are perfectly willing to prioritize.

The poll’s respondents, for example, said they would rather cut military spending than Medicare or Social Security (and several bipartisan groupshave made specific suggestions for doing so). If Medicare and Social Security must be changed, people prefer increasing payroll taxes on high-income households or raising the Medicare eligibility age – not cutting back on Social Security paychecks or Medicare treatments. Within the tax code, a reduced tax break for mortgage interest looks more palatable than a reduced tax break for health insurance.

Lesson learned: when the question is framed properly, the common sense solutions ARE self-evident.

Health Care Reform Will Help Everybody (Barbara O’Brien)

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[Guest blogger Barbara O'Brien blogs regularly at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, AlterNet, and elsewhere on the progressive political and health blogophere. She has also been a panelist at Netroots Nation and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC.]

Many Americans assume the new health care reform act will benefit mostly the poor and uninsured and hurt everyone else, according to polls. As Matt Yglesias wrote, “Basically, people see this as a bill that will take resources from people who have health insurance and give it to people who don’t have health insurance.” Those who still oppose the reform say that people ought to pay for their own health care.

We all believe in the virtues of hard work and self-reliance, but these days it’s a fantasy to think that anyone but the mega-wealthy will not, sooner or later, depend on help from others to pay medical bills. And that’s true no matter how hard you work, how much you love America, or how diligently you take care of yourself. The cost of medical care has so skyrocketed that breaking an arm or leg could cost as much as a new car. And if you get cancer or heart disease — which can happen even to people who live healthy lifestyles — forget about it. The disease will not only clean you out; it will leave a whopping debt for your survivors to pay.

And the truth is, we all pay for other peoples’ health care whether we know it or not. When people can’t pay their medical bills, the cost of their health care gets added to everyone else’s bills and insurance premiums. When poor people use emergency rooms as a doctor of last resort, their care is not “free.” You pay for it.

Another common fantasy about medical care is that the “free market” provides incentives for medical companies to develop innovative new drugs and treatments for disease without government subsidy. It’s true that private enterprise is very good at developing profitable health care products. But not all medical care can be made profitable.

For years, the U.S. government has been funding medical research that the big private companies don’t want to do because there is too much cost for the potential profit. This is especially true for diseases that are rare and expensive to treat. An example of a recent advance made possible by government grants include new guidelines for malignant pleural mesothelioma treatment developed by MD Anderson Cancer Center researchers. Another is a blood screening test developed by mesothelioma doctors like thoracic surgeon Dr. David Sugarbaker. The health reform act provides for more dollars for such research, from which even many of the tea party protesters will benefit.

The biggest fantasy of all was that people who had insurance didn’t have to worry about health care costs. But the fact is that in recent years millions of Americans have been bankrupted by medical costs, and three-quarters of the medically bankrupt had health insurance. And yes, insurance companies even dumped hard-working, law-abiding patriots. But the health care reform act will put an end to that, and now America’s hard-working, law-abiding patriots are more financially secure, whether they like it or not.