HEALTH CARE REFORM: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

By Jerry D. Rose

I continue to receive numerous solicitations, by e-mail and regular mail, to write or phone someone or other (the White House, members of Congress, personal associates) or attend a meeting to “show support” for the health care bill now pending in Congress.  These solicitations come from many supposedly “progressive” individuals and groups, like the one I received in the mail today from Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, chair of the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives.

I have attended one “faith-based” meeting, an ecumenical call for people of various churches to attend a meeting which culminated in the moderator distributing a list of cell phone numbers of members of Congress and the White House for us to call, even himself pulling out his cell phone and then and there making one of the calls.

This one meeting turned out to be the limit of my tolerance for supporting a measure that was not clearly understood by those “supporting” it (as indeed it could not then be understood because then as now the bill is being hashed and debated over, and “triangulated” around the different stakeholder interests.)  There is so little content to WHAT is  being urged that it comes down really to supporting Obama personally, in whatever version of his “plan” might ever emerge.  Is this any way to “do” democracy?

The one clear thing being demanded, of course, in all these solicitations is the “public option” that will supposedly serve to make health care more affordable by providing competition in insurance rates between a public insuring agency and the private ones which have so gouged the public for so long.  Without further and mostly-rejected other cost-cutting measures,  the public option would come nowhere close to making affordable health care available to all Americans.  This is spelled out most convincingly in a recent article by a doctor associated with Physicians for a National Health Program.

So what insurance “reform” will emerge out of these political maneuverings?  Of course I don’t know, but I think the outlines of that beast emerge from the fog when we examine the experience of the state of Florida in another kind of insurance system, that for homeowners.  The last spate of hurricanes in the state (4  years ago) produced a crisis in insurance coverage when insurers refused to insure properties in Florida against hurricane damage, and the state set up a “public option” (if you will) homeowners insurance system called Citizens Insurance that would indeed provide this coverage and at rates that are “affordable” because they drastically reduce hurricane damage protection by providing for huge deductibles.  In other words, Floridians can buy insurance at an affordable price, but only because what they are buying is “junk insurance” with very high deductibles for hurricane-related damages. Just so, the drive toward “health care for all” will, absent stringent cost controls, result in another junk insurance program in which the high cost of insurance and the high levels of deductibles and co-payments will give insurance coverage to “everybody” (or many more bodies), but it will either be “Cadillac” insurance at exorbitant premiums that only the wealthy can pay; or “jalopy” insurance that won’t take one anywhere in terms of coverage of health needs. A less-than-wealthy person could financially survive a catastrophic illness no better than a middle-income Floridian homeowner could survive a catastrophic hurricane.

So the net result of all this reform would seem to be perpetuation of inequality of health care available to the wealthy and the poor.  If this is “reform” and the “change we can believe in,” where’s my change, Dude?

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Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist