Well, the Court ruled and now everyone has to live with it, everyone except the Teabaggers and the far right. They’re still, hanging onto their anger, jumping up and down, whining like spoiled little brats and trying for the 33rd time to pass a wholly useless resolution in the House, condemning healthcare. Too bad they haven’t got anything better to do. I mean, God forbid that they actually try to put together some kind of deal that would attack joblessness. The Democrats; not much better, will party for a short time and then instead of jumping in and fixing the parts of the law that desperately need fixing, they will do what they do best…nothing.
The Affordable Care Act is, like 300 congressmen at the bottom of the ocean, a good start, but it still needs a lot of work.
Froma Harrop writing on health care in Nation of Change claims that what this country needs is not a conservative America or a liberal America but a modern America, one in which we are at least equal in cost and delivery with other nations in the world. Unfortunately we are not. Right now we spend more on healthcare than any other nation in the world and we get damned little for it.
We are 9th in life expectancy and 178th in infant mortality among other, more depressing statistics. That is pathetic and everyone who doesn’t want an efficient healthcare system should be ashamed of themselves.
Republican’s say they don’t want top-down government control of health care. So what do they want, top down insurance and drug company control; because that’s what we have now and it’s killing us, both physically and fiscally. Hospitals, drug manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, labs, hospital executives and especially insurers are driving the system into the ground.
The super high cost of insurance is only one of the problems but let’s look at it for just a moment and find out why, other than the fact that it’s badly run, insurance costs are so high. Yearly executive compensation could give us a hint. Let’s take a look at the CEO’s of six major insurance companies and what they get in the way of annual compensation.
David Cordani- Cigna- $19.0 million ($52,054 per day)
Stephen Hemsley- United Health- $13.3 million- ($36,438 per day)
Angela Brady- Wellpoint- $13.2 million- ($35,164 per day)
Allen Wise- Coventry- $12.9 million ($35,342 per day)
Mark Bertolini- Aetna- $10.5 million- ($28,767 per day)
Michael McCalister- Humana- $7.3 million ($20,000 per day)
Average America yearly salary= $34,053 a year. That means only two of the top six make less in a day that the average person makes in a year. That’s pretty sickening. And these guys aren’t innovators or entrepreneurs, they’re just high priced bean counters.
This is why Obama wanted a single payer system. Those salaries and others like them are breaking American taxpayers backs. They are why drug companies want us to buy $50 drugs when $10 drugs are just as effective, but it’s not just the insurance companies (although they are among the major offenders) it’s also doctors who order unnecessary tests to make more money or to cover their asses against lawsuits, drug companies that charge horrendous fees for drugs that cost, even with the R&D figured in, far less.
Let’s face it. There’s nothing wrong with ACA that having had a Republican pass it wouldn’t have cured. After all it was their idea in the first place, it’s just that none of them nor any of the politicians who came before them over the last 60 years cared enough or had big enough balls to do the work. None of them wanted to go against the huge corporate interests that paid their bills. Obama did the work, he cared enough about it, to do the heavy lifting and he got it done and now a Right Wing Supreme Court justified his work, and the chances he took, and has given it credence.
Sure there are things that have to be changed in order to make Obamacare the perfect health policy for the country. They start with getting rid of the insurance companies and ushering in a single payer system.
What, you say, make government bigger just so it can control our health acre system. What the hell do you think it’s doing now. Medicaid and Medicare already make up he biggest part of the healthcare system and they, for those who haven’t noticed, are government programs that work pretty well; certainly far better than the rest of the healthcare system.
I’ve used this in another blog somewhere but one of my favorite signs ever is one I saw at a Tea Party rally that read, “Get the government’s hands off my Medicare.” You can’t fix stupid.
The idea behind Obamacare was not just to make health insurance chaeper and to cover more people but to streamline the system, to eliminate waste. Somehow this became, in the mouths of the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world, death panels. It’s an interesting leap, from cutting costs by eliminating waste and unnecessary protocols to pulling the plug on old people. I guess there are a lot of old people on the far right who think about that a lot. Maybe if they had educated their kids better, they wouldn’t have to worry about it now. Anyhow, aside from Rush’s death panels there really are ways to cut costs, universal computer record keeping being the first one. Right now there is a segment of ACA that says insurance companies must spend 80% of their income on actual health care and if they don’t they have to pay out refunds to their customers. I saw a blog the other day that claimed they now owe $15,100 to every single of subscriber in the country, and that, that number is increasing every day.
But if the insurance companies were no longer in the health care business, little adjuncts to the law like that one wouldn’t be necessary. The government doesn’t need to make a profit so we will save at least 20% of all healthcare costs (insurance company profits) just by kicking the insurance companies down the hill.
Then there is tort reform. This was a big deal to the right and it should be. The cost of mal-practice insurance is driving doctors out of business and driving the cost of medical care through the roof. That doesn’t mean that the ability to sue an incompetent doctor should be taken off the table but there must be a way to filter out the frivolous suits that clog up the courts and uselessly drive up the costs of medical care. Obviously some kind of panel, made up of medical and legal professionals that would weed out the ambulance chaser suits would work better than the present system.
Oh, by the way, when universal health insurance was Romney’s idea instead of Obama’s it was much less comprehensive than it is now. It did little to confront rising health acre costs. Despite that, a 2012 poll shows that Massachusetts residents who are now enjoying the system as installed by Romney, overwhelmingly support universal coverage despite the higher expense. Instead of eliminating it they are looking for ways to lower the expense and keep it.
What the hell is wrong with the rest of the country?