The arguments against the Health Care Public Option are based on Red Herrings that have been put up to try to stop this necessary part of real health care reform. To start with, quoting the supposed ‘extra cost over ten years’ is meant to frighten us. The trillion dollars, or more recently the 1.6 trillion dollars, that the government would have to pay, comes to less per year than we are spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Getting out of there might be a good way of paying for those ‘extra costs’.
But do you really believe that if everyone was covered, we as a nation, would, overall, be paying more for health care? Considering that those who are uninsured end up using emergency rooms for their care and typically wait until it is an emergency before they seek treatment, and that we all end up paying for their care through higher costs for hospitals, doctors and other insured treatments, it seems obvious that the overall costs would be less, if everyone were covered and could seek care when they first needed it.
So the question is really, who pays for it, not how much does it cost.
If everyone was covered and higher premiums, in the form of taxes and fees, were paid by those who could afford it and those that couldn’t pay were subsidized, and if there were incentives for people to stay healthy and have regular checkups, the overall costs would be less than we are paying now and our concern would be ‘what to do with the surplus’.
Leon