Is the problem with the health care reform bill, or is it with the Congress?
“My father was born in poverty on a small Ozark farm. He died in poverty too, but not because of his own laziness or waste or mismanagement. He had been a successful commercial artist with 20 employees. No, he died in poverty because he was a hard worker and always paid his bills and died trying to pay the astronomical bills from the cancer that killed my mother. My father fought in WWII. He believed in this country and this country let him down. It’s too late for my father. It’s too late for too many. It’s way past time for healthcare reform. It’s time for single payer healthcare.” (William Ridenour, IL, in Death by Spreadsheet, newsletter of the non-profit organization, HealthCare Now!)
Last week, President Obama made another effort to garner bipartisan support for a health care reform bill. However, the 7 1/2-hour marathon policy session ended on a bleak note, with Obama noting that accord between Democrats and Republicans on heath care reform may not be possible.
May be it is time to take a step back and ask, where exactly is the problem with the bill?
Discussion about a health care reform bill is not new – it has been on the table for many years. Remember the efforts of both the Clintons? So what is the real issue here?
It is very clear that our country needs a Health Care reform. We can‘t let the insurance companies go out of control – being concerned with nothing but the bottom line. The nation’s five largest for-profit insurers closed 2009 with a combined profit of $12.2 billion, according to a report by the advocacy group Health Care for American Now (HCAN). With the economic recession, people are losing their coverage. Just in the past year, 2.7 million people lost their private coverage, adding to an incredible number of uninsured. A new Census report finds that, in 2008, the number of people without health insurance increased from 45.7 million to 46.3 million (the number of uninsured has increased by 7.3 million since 2000).
Another interesting statistic is that nearly two-thirds (62.1 percent) of all bankruptcies filed in the US in 2007 were attributable to medical costs, according to a study published in the August, 2009 issue of the American Journal of Medicine. The data were collected prior to the current economic downturn and hence likely understate the current burden of financial suffering. Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6 percent. What is even more shocking is that most of those bankrupted by medical problems in fact had health insurance. More than three-quarters (77.9 percent) were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness, including 60.3 percent who had private coverage. Most of the medically bankrupt were solidly middle class before financial disaster hit. Two-thirds were homeowners and three-fifths had gone to college. In many cases, high medical bills coincided with a loss of income as illness forced breadwinners to lose time from work. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance.
It is true that even with the best health care reform possible under the current system of governance, it will still fall short of truly Humanist ideals, which would require that every single person in the country have access to free and decent healthcare, as part of their human rights. However, we already know that the undocumented immigrants (estimated at over 10 million people) – who live, work and spend their money in this country – will have no access to any of the proposed health care coverage. Having said that, it still makes perfect moral and practical sense to support this process of health care reform, and do everything we can to help pass a legislation that will give health care coverage to 30 million currently uninsured Americans.
But, while we campaign for health care reforms, we cannot forget that the real discussion is not about health care at all – it is but a smokescreen. The real discussion is about money. Many republicans have stated that reform is a good idea, but that they don’t see the funding source for it, and that it will cost too much. This is truly incredible – coming from the same group of people who supported President Bush by giving him carte blanche to go to war against Iraq – based on an unfounded allegation about weapons of mass destruction! They have not had trouble finding the money, year after year, to fund the war, and to increase the military budget to a record high. The cost of war in Iraq is currently at $709,463,072,511 (over 700 Billion). As of October 2009, the monthly spending in Iraq was $7.3 billion. And the cost of deploying one U.S. soldier in Iraq for one year? $390,000! This is definitely not the right group of people to judge whether there’s enough money so people can get treated when they are ill!
In the proposed U.S. budget for 2011, Medicare and Medicaid funding total $489.3 billion and $264.5 billion, respectively. Imagine that we had spent the Iraq war funding to cover both Medicare and Medicaid for a year. That would have been a great way to spend our tax dollars, and save the lives of thousands of Iraqi and American civilians and military personnel in the bargain!
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