A friend and fellow blogger, vjack of the excellent blog Red State Progressive, has written a very good post on this subject. I agree with every single word he has written, so I am reposting his intelligent analysis here:
The debate of health care reform in the United States has been focusing on the wrong questions. Obsessing over whether the Affordable Care Act makes President Obama (and Mitt Romney) socialists is pointless. Deciding whether an individual mandate is a penalty, a tax, or something else entirely is relatively trivial. We should be asking ourselves how to expand coverage, reduce costs, and improve patient care. Fortunately, there is an obvious answer.
Expanded Access to Healthcare
We need to reduce the number of uninsured people down to zero. Not only is this a moral imperative (i.e., health care should be a basic right and not a privilege), but our health care costs are higher because of the large number of uninsured people we now have. That is, those of us with health insurance pay much higher costs than necessary to subsidize the uninsured. The U.S. needs to join the rest of the industrialized world by providing universal healthcare.
Affordable Healthcare
It makes little sense that people would end up in poverty in the wealthiest nation on the planet simply because of a medical emergency. Our healthcare costs have gotten out of hand, and little relief is in sight. Expanding access is prohibitively expensive as long as we remain wedded to our current healthcare system. However, we already have two extremely effective models for how to simultaneously expand access to healthcare and control costs: Medicare and the VA healthcare system.
Improved Healthcare
The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation, and our healthcare outcomes are not particularly good. Other nations offer superior care for much less money. Too much of what we spend for healthcare does not go to patient care at all but to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Along with improving access to healthcare and bringing down healthcare costs, we need to focus on improving patient care across the system.
The Solution: Single-Payer
The solution is fairly obvious: the U.S. needs a national healthcare system. If you poll the general public, you will find that a majority support a single-payer national healthcare system. If you poll physicians, you will find the same thing. If you examine the data in other industrialized nations with single-payer systems, you find universal coverage, lower costs, and better patient outcomes.
The Obama administration shut down serious discussion of a single-payer system early in the process and killed the public option next. This is unacceptable. The Affordable Care Act may be a small step in the right direction, but it ignores the obvious reality that we need a single-payer system.
Thanks for the mention. I do hope the U.S. will eventually get to single-payer, but I fear that it may take much longer than it should. I really don't see how we make significant improvements to our healthcare system without it.
ReplyDelete"Give me Liberty, or Give me Death!" - Patrick Henry
ReplyDeleteWhat a brilliant ruling by the United States Supreme Court on the affordable health care act (Obamacare). Stunningly brilliant in my humble opinion. I could not have ask for a better ruling on a potentially catastrophic healthcare act than We The People Of The United States received from our Supreme Court.
If the court had upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate under the commerce clause it would have meant the catastrophic loss of the most precious thing we own. Our individual liberty. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Supreme Court.
There is no mandate to buy private for-profit health insurance. There is only a nominal tax on income eligible individuals who don’t have health insurance. This is a HUGE! difference. And I suspect that tax may be subject to constitutional challenge as it ripens.
This is a critically important distinction. Because under the commerce clause individuals would have been compelled to support the most costly, dangerous, unethical, morally repugnant, and defective type of health insurance you can have. For-profit health insurance, and the for-profit proxies called private non-profits and co-ops.
Equally impressive in the courts ruling was the majorities willingness to throw out the whole law if the court could not find a way to sever the individual mandate under the commerce clause from the rest of the act. Bravo! Supreme Court.
Thanks to the Supreme Court we now have an opportunity to fix our healthcare crisis the right way. Without the obscene delusion that Washington can get away with forcing Americans to buy a costly, dangerous and highly defective private product (for-profit health insurance).
During the passage of ACA/Obamacare some politicians said that the ACA was better than nothing. But the truth was that until the Supreme Court fixed it the ACA/Obamacare was worse than nothing at all. It would have meant the catastrophic loss of your precious liberty for the false promise and illusion of healthcare security under the deadly and costly for-profit healthcare system that dominates American healthcare.
As everyone knows now. The fix for our healthcare crisis is a single payer system (Medicare for all) like the rest of the developed world has. Or a robust Public Option choice available to everyone on day one that can quickly lead to a single payer system.
We still have a healthcare crisis in America. With hundreds of thousands dieing needlessly every year in America. And a for-profit medical industrial complex that threatens the security and health of the entire world. The ACA/Obamacare will not fix that.
The for-profit medical industrial complex has already attacked the world with H1N1 killing thousands, and injuring millions. And more attacks are planned for profit, and to feed their greed.
To all of you who have fought so hard to do the kind and right thing for your fellow human beings at a time of our greatest needs I applaud you. Be proud of your-self.
God Bless You my fellow human beings. I'm proud to be one of you. You did good.
See you on the battle field.
Sincerely
jacksmith – WorkingClass :-)