Politics of Delay and Confuse versus Trust Me
As the Senate moves slowly towards a Health Care Reform bill, I am struck by the display of politics based upon “delay and confuse” versus “trust me”. In fact there is no basis for either position. Republicans are simply irresponsible and/or cruel to keep up their campaign to confuse Americans about what might happen and not to propose anything that could fix the current system. Democrats, on the other hand, cry out about the morality of fixing health care and are totally silent about the underlying problems inherent with the current system and especially Medicare.
What neither party is addressing is that the current health care system is too costly (by any standard) and going broke, and compared too all other modern industrialized countries does not deliver as good health care. This is the real problem.
It is also true that in other systems, like those of Canada, Germany, France, and Japan (to name a few), no one can be denied basic health care for any reason. So why are our politicians not focusing on “best in class”?
Polls have consistently shown a majority of Americans favor a single payer approach. Yet neither party is talking about it. Why? Medicare works well with respect to the ease Americans 65 and older find it to use. But Medicare is paying cents on the dollar for the health care services it covers and is still projected to go bust in the near future. Why?
At this point Americans are not being served well by either political party. The “reform” that is likely to be enacted will be to include more people which is noble but an illusion until the main problems are fixed. Like most things in America it will take a crisis, like when doctors and hospitals stop dispensing their services. We could do so much better if we simple used data.
This entry was posted on September 30, 2009 at 10:26 am and is filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Politics, Republican Party. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: congress, health care insurance, health care reform, Healthcare, medicare, Senate, single payer
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September 30, 2009 at 11:39 am
I respectfully disagree with you. The President has expounded on the very issues you so eloquently raised. Isn’t he a democrat?
September 30, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Scuffy, President Obama has given a number of speeches and interviews… He has emphasized the lack of stability of the current system and he has stressed the high yearly increase in cost but has not drawn comparisons to other countries. He has, for political purposes, talked about not increasing the national debt to pay for reform. Good but not good enough… The problem with his approach is that at the end of the day we will have 30 plus more people insured, private insurance companies raising their premiums to cover the increased risk since they can not deny coverage any longer, and Medicare still not paying its way. Regaining the Center is about paying your way and using facts and data to make pragmatic decisions. That is tough to do today it seems.