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A personal view on healthcare problems
Mr. Don Brunell, President Association of Washington Business, recently expressed the view in the “Your Turn” column, titled, “We Should Replicate Success, Not Failure” that any national healthcare alternative to private medical insurance was doomed to failure. His reasoning was, it had been tried by several other states, Maine, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Tennessee and it failed. He doesn’t state why these healthcare systems failed, other than high cost. Apparently the dispensing of good health care wasn’t one of them.
I’m retired and have no business interests to support in this view, nor do I have any interest in the medical field. Mr. Brunell on the other hand, I’m sure is paid well to promote the interests of business, otherwise he wouldn’t be writing under an AWB heading.
I don’t have any real problem with that, unless someone is trying to put something over that just isn’t as good as we are being told it is by the medical insurance industry, whose concern and motive is not the best medical care for every legal American, but the threat NHC poses to the medical insurance industries’ profit margin.
Let’s look at the problem from my perspective. Before I retired I had a good job and good medical insurance from where I worked. My wife also had medical insurance from where she worked. She came down with breast cancer, and her medical insurance cancelled her. Her sister in Florida came down with the same cancer. Her insurance also cancelled her. I was able to get my wife onto my medical insurance policy at work. Her sister could not get any medical insurance. The end result was, although both are now cancer free at the moment, her sister is $50,000 in debt, and figures she can never retire because of the medical bills and interest.
Yes, I am extremely grateful we had good medical insurance, or we would be now living in a box, as my wife came down with breast cancer two more times. But let us not forget, I was paying $850 a month for that medical insurance, $10,200 a year, and at a group rate! And that was without any dental coverage. Also that yearly insurance premium cost I mentioned was five years ago!
Mr. Brunell seems to think that changing a few laws here and there across state lines will solve the problem of the current lack of competition between insurance companies, and make things all better. Let’s get real here. The last thing the insurance companies want is competition! If they did, the laws Mr. Brunell talks about would have been lobbied and changed long ago. If the insurance companies really cared about your medical welfare, 30 million legal Americans would be able to afford insurance, who can’t today.
Don’t get me wrong here, everybody needs to make a profit for the system to function. But the problem the last 15 years or so seems to be, what is the difference between a reasonable and fair profit and downright greed! In short, people in the medical insurance industry are deciding who gets care and who doesn’t by greed, and not need, all in the name of corporate profits.
Then I hear the threat by corporations that NHC will lead to socialism taking over the country. Pardon me, but it kind of makes me wonder why it was OK to bail out the banks, and giving their CEO’s and employees enough bonus money to probably settle the California state budget deficit, all for being so greedy they collapsed the economy. And it seems okay to bail out GM, too, that made cars that didn’t sell. However, when it comes to the average legal American to have access to reasonable national healthcare, that sets a dangerous precedent that could lead to socialism.
I’m also told that national health care will drive the deficit through the roof, and it will bankrupt the country. I’ve kind of wondered, if you took the cost of all the current private medical insurance premiums that are paid in each year to medical insurance companies, and then took the estimated cost of the NHC system for a year and compared the costs of the two side by side, what it would show. I’ve never seen that statistic even suggested. I wonder why? It’s like private health insurance doesn’t cost the general public, or employers anything. Or could it be that on a per capita basis, private insurance is way more expensive than NHC. It also seems to me that if that wasn’t true, the insurance companies would be yelling that from the highest mountain.
One thing is for sure, though, you’re paying through the nose for private medical insurance right now! You’re limited on your coverage. You’re limited on your lifetime medical costs benefit. You can be cancelled when your profit margin in the eyes of the insurance company is no longer a sure thing. And that cancellation can occur when you need it the most. But Mr Brunell doesn’t seem to get that, you buy insurance to protect you against the bad times. Not the good times.
Me? I’m on Medicare, and have a supplement to pick up what Medicare doesn’t. It works, it has a few problems, but I’ll tell you what. I sure as hell am glad it is there, and I save $550 a month over my previous private medical insurance premium.
I believe that no legal American should be bankrupted over an unforeseen medical problem beyond their control. If that makes me a socialist, I guess I am then. However I prefer to think of it as just plain ole common sense.
