The Real Lesson from Health Care Reform - The Language of Morals

If we are to actually win and secure healthcare for all, it is precisely the moral argument that needs to be front and center.

via Huffington Post, by William A. Smith

In my decade-plus of working in Washington on policy matters, I've followed more bills than I care to remember. But this time around, the healthcare reform debate strikes me as different. Maybe it is what it says about what we as a people value...or don't. With the Senate Finance Committee having finally voted out a bill that seems the source of consternation for many, a fundamental lesson is emerging from the entire spectacle that warrants our attention.

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Are 119 million American wrong about health care?

via Consortiumnews.com, by Robert Parry

As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare – and that’s why the choice can’t be permitted.

In other words, the industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that.

The peculiar argument that 119 million Americans must be denied the public option that they prefer has been made most notably by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which is one of two panels that has jurisdiction over the health insurance bill.

“As many as 119 million Americans would shift from private coverage to the government plan,” Grassley wrote in a column for Politico.com. That migration, Grassley said, would “put America on the path toward a completely government-run health care system. … Eventually, the government plan would overtake the entire market.”

Grassley’s logic is that so many Americans would prefer a government-run plan that the private health insurance industry would collapse or become a shadow of its current self. That, in turn, would lead even more Americans entering the government plan, making private insurance even less viable.

Rarely has an argument more dramatically highlighted the philosophical question of whether in a democracy, the government should represent the people’s interests or an industry’s.

But Grassley said he is simply upholding “the promise that if you like the coverage you have, you can keep it. … That’s why I’m concerned about a government-run plan that forces people out of private insurance.”

The counter-argument, of course, might be that if the health insurance industry hadn’t dissatisfied so many customers – indeed forcing many sick people into bankruptcy because of excessive fees, denial of coverage and gaps in permitted medical treatments – there wouldn’t be so many Americans eager for a public option.

So, now to protect the health insurance industry, Congress must stop 119 million Americans from leaping into the arms of a government plan.

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AlterNet - How Can We Expect an Industry That Profits from Disease and Sickness to Police Itself?

via AlterNet, by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

The health care industry has spent $134 million on lobbying this year to keep its profits high and public health in the shadows.

In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told a local AFL-CIO meeting, “I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program.”

Single payer. Universal. That’s health coverage, like Medicare, but for everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It’s a system that polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as two-to-one.

There was only one thing standing in the way, Obama said six years ago: “All of you know we might not get there immediately because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate and we have to take back the House.”

Fast forward six years. President Obama has everything he said was needed – Democrats in control of the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. So what’s happened to single payer?

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