Wednesday, September 2, 2009

health carelessness

Obama is looking to reshape the national debate on healthcare which is political speak for “how do we retreat back to our corners and lick our wounds”. I like the idea of health-care reform but have for a long time thought the argument they have made is messy and filled with holes.


One of my biggest issue is with the present incarceration of health-care reform is how it keeps the onus of paying for it on the companies in this country. As much as the insurance companies talk about keeping it privatized as opposed to offering a public-option what they don’t tell you is that the burden falls on the small-and-large companies in this country and one way or another the government pays for it too. This issue has been discussed on TOR a lot but what I find most troubling is that in this day-and-age almost every company has to offer health-care to get compete and the government has made it abundantly clear that this is the way they want to continue bringing health-care to the public.

Two issues with this


1) The health and well being of a country probably should not be left to a for-profit industry with little regulations.


2) They want the government to stay out of the health-care EXCEPT…….to help pay for it.


The first issue is pretty simple. If you are watching corporate profits and you are going basically unregulated there is at least a chance that you will not be offering people the best care. Why would you want to spend thousands of dollars on an operation that may not work or a test which may not find anything. Corporations shouldn’t run health-care, at least not unregulated.

The second is a bit more complicated but the way I see it anyway you cut it healthcare costs both today and in the future are going to be funded by the government. See anybody in the health-care industry who tries to convince you that it’s a private-option seem to forget that it’s paid for in a large part through tax-breaks given to corporations anyway. The private sector winds up being forced to eat the health-care of the country by the government and decisions on health-care are thus made by boardrooms and not in dining-rooms.

Whatever happened to people paying their own way for their own things? The insurance companies are a bunch of crooks who will use their deep pockets and gigantic lobbying reach to try to reach the general public through scare-tactics and then strong-arm the legislation. What I find to be the biggest scam is that they keep trumpeting the private-option and keeping the governments hands out of health-care while in actuality they are in bed with them. The major insurance companies lobby the government to force small-and-big businesses to offer health-care to their employers which is almost always delivered by….the major insurance companies.

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