In light of signs that moderate Democrats may cave in to Republicans and lobbyists, Mike The Mad Biologist suggests: If you support the public option for healthcare reform, write to your senators and president.
I spent a lot of time today doing just that; by email, by web forms, and even by plain old snail mail with actual stamps. Defenders of the status quo are pulling out all the stops to protect their profits, sending out hordes of lobbyists and calling in every political favor in existence. To arms! Take up your pens and keyboards!
NOTES:
- Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings takes down Republican objections to the public option in Testing My Patients.
- Here’s a TV ad for Obama’s plan. A bit simplistic, but it gets the idea across:
So here is my question. Once you take away the incentive for employers to provide healthcare why would they provide it? And once employers stop providing healthcare and everyone is on the government dime, how will the US afford it?
Creeping socialism, eh? As GM has often complained, foreign carmakers enjoy a huge advantage because their workers have public health care.
Unlikely that everyone would end up on the limited package offered by the government. In practice, really big companies offer premium packages, and smaller companies will be better able to prosper because they won’t have to bear that burden.
Really small businesses – the kind politicians are always yammering about – already don’t offer health care. Their employees walk the high wire without a net, among millions of uninsured just scraping by.
As for how the US can afford it, we already spend the most per person on health care, and other countries that spend a lot less are getting better results. We already ration health care through massive and unwieldy bureaucracies – the health insurance companies themselves, whose only motive is profit. We are literally delivering health care in the stupidest, most expensive way possible. Universal health care is able to emphasize far cheaper routine checkups and prevention, much less emergency room care.
If you want to know how health care works in other countries – including some that have innovative private systems very different from ours, visit this series: Health care here and abroad.
“Universal health care is able to emphasize far cheaper routine checkups and prevention, much less emergency room care.”
Able, but not always delivering. I would like to see the numbers on unnecessary emergency visits between the US and various countries with universal single pay systems and those where the public/private mix is substantial.
The real key (at least in my experience) is to have an adequate number, and geographical distribution of, family practice doctors and nurse practitioners. If those resources aren’t available, people default to the ER and also NEED the ER more as they have not had access to wellness care.
The elephant in the room that no one is acknowledging is information systems integration. A national system requires a well-thought-out, well-implemented IT infrastructure to be truly efficient. Consultants in this space will be big “winner$”, with not a few being a total waste of O2.