a bandaid for a gunshot

Nothing is more exciting than a prime-time speech by the POTUS in front of both houses of congress with the entire world looking on as Nancy Pelosi blinks her way through 46 minutes of Obama speaking.

 

I particularly liked Joe Wilson pulling a turrets moment and screaming at Obama as if he was at a Green Day concert or at least a member of the House of Commons. I also appreciated the fact that they got a paper prop of John Kerry since he was apparently wind-surfing off Martha ’s Vineyard. I also appreciated the fact that the women in the Democrat’s contingent of the house all wore floral colors so the entire thing looked like a choreographed kaleidoscope whenever they jumped out of their chairs to applaud the president sneezing.

 

What I really appreciated was that for the first time since making this his signature domestic issue, Obama actually took charge of this issue and made it his own.

 

I got a tweet about 15 minutes into it from regular TOR reader Philthy Ryan who asked rhetorically why Obama doesn’t ask any member of congress who does NOT agree with the concept of health-care reform to stand up, this way we know who’s so greased up by the insurance companies that no sense can be made anyway.

 

What I just don’t like is that health-care reform still is patch-work and band-aid stuff, not true overhaul which I’m convinced is what needs to happened. We can talk about malpractice insurance being too high (I agree), hospitals needing electronic record keeping (this is 2009 after-all), more preventative practice (OK this is getting too easy) and less complacency to act but this entire issue comes down to a few major issues in my mind

 

1. Health Care should NOT be a for-profit operation; it is too important for the well-being of the country (literally) and has NOT proven to keep its prices inline. Now I do NOT suggest that the federal government should be running health-care’s ins and outs this should be contracted out to companies who can handle it. Nicholas Kristof last week made the point that the Police department, Fire department, Parks departments and even the DMV are not run on a for-profit organization as they are too crucial to the well being of the state to be left in the hands of others. I am a raging capitalist and am not suggesting we have some form of socialism but I do believe that health-care is not one which can run unregulated like it has.
2.  Health care should be decoupled from the workplace. I have said it a 1000 times but this comes down to too many problems.

•  When companies are the provider of health-care it ties it’s employees to a certain type of coverage which they did not have a say in regarding their own families needs. Decisions on the coverage of people should be made in living rooms not board-rooms
• When people lose their job (this seems to happen a lot in a recession by the way) people will also lose their health-care. Yeah there is COBRA but this is debilitating expensive.
• Having the government force companies to pay for health-care by threatening to fine them if they do not or otherwise offer incentives with payroll tax cuts puts undue stress on the small and large businesses in this country. Let companies make widgets not worry about the well-being of a country
• The costs that companies are absorbing cut into their profits which is counter to capitalism, the tax savings they get should be given to individuals and the savings companies get by not offering health-care should be used to compensate employees more. Wages are stagnant in part because companies are paying more every year for health-care.
• Small companies feel a larger burden than large ones do since they themselves cannot get the same kind of rates as the large ones are able to negotiate. This leave employees of small companies paying more for less

 

Now my big complaint about health-care is that nobody from the Health-care side ever comes up with anything new, content to stay with the status quo. Why do you think this happens?

 

Because they are doing so well!!!!

 

They say that a public option will cut services which are completely counter bullshit. Look at the VA hospitals and Medicare and see how many services are cut there.

 

They say that it will cost the government a trillion dollars but they conveniently forget that today’s health-care is already funded by the government. When the government doesn’t collect taxes this is lost revenue.

 

What they should say is that they don’t want to cut their corporate profits which they make today because things are pretty good for most people in the medical field (hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies).

  

I suggest people should get a tax break for getting health-insurance; people should make decisions on what health-care to buy. People should be making decisions about what plan works for them based on their own needs not be decided in board-rooms. Have people decide which hospitals they will use based on the price and service they provide not limited to the plan their employer has chosen. Health care needs to be turned on its head and sadly I’m afraid all they are doing is putting a band-aid on a gun-shot wound.