Two major competing plans-Single Payer and Public Option- are proposed to alleviate the problems of health care coverage. Under the Single Payer health care system, there would be one program, similar to Medicare but with all citizens covered. Although President Obama, as a senator, advocated the Single Payer system, he now believes the best proposal is the Public Option. The Public Option plan allows more than 80 million workers to keep or change their insurance coverage, buy into the government-run public plan, or go uninsured. The Public Option plan would protect the insurance industry, while reducing costs; the Single Payer system would threaten the industry, and relegate it to providing only supplemental or special needs insurance. The Public Option plan allows workers and employers to keep their own insurance or to enroll in the government insurance; there would be no choice in Single Payer system. Advocates of the Single Payer system argue that by enrolling all citizens into one system, costs would be significantly less because of the ability to negotiate with the health care industry and the probable reduction in administrative costs. The Public Option would also influence drug companies and health care providers, but the result could be less reduction than under the Single Payer system. Both Single Payer and Public Option plans eliminate or significantly reduce deductibles and co-pays.
The conservatives, and most Republicans, don't buy into either plan. Sen. Jim DeMint (RS.C.) explained one of the major reasons why conservatives will do everything they can to block health care reform. DeMint told about 100 leaders of Conservatives for Patients Rights, July 17, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." Of course, DeMint may be an unofficial paid puppet for the parts of the health care industry that doesn't want reform. During the past five years, DeMint received $2,917,870 in campaign contributions from the health care industry, according official campaign reports published by OpenSecrets.com. Michael Steele, chair of the Republican National Committee, agrees with DeMint's "analysis" of what defeating health care reform can do to the Obama presidency. "I think that's a good way to put it," he told reporters at the National Press Club, July 20. For his part, Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and possible Republican candidate for president, gleefully claimed on talk radio that health care reform "could be the bill that drags his whole presidency down and they look back on it and suddenly the whole thing is unraveled."
Disregarding the absurdity of Republican statements that place partisan politics above health care reform, the conservatives have other issues. They complain they don't want government running any part of anything, especially health care. They ignore provisions of proposed Single Payer legislation that remove the middle-men insurance companies. They claim that no bureaucrat should step between a physician and a patient. Of course, they don't mind that private enterprise, in the guise of the megagoliath insurance and drug industries, do that all the time.
The conservatives argue that competition between insurance companies keeps costs low, but they ignore a study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine that concluded that about 30 percent of all health care costs are for overhead expenses, including executive bonuses and aggressive advertising and marketing campaigns by drug and insurance companies. They disregard the reality that patients and their physicians, dentists, optometrists, and other health care providers will determine the best treatments, and not an insurance clerk reading myriad pages of rules and regulations established by-who else?-insurance companies. They ignore the fact that universal health care coverage would reduce "cherry picking," the enrollment of only healthy persons in order to "maximize profits." The Public Option plan allows insurance companies to continue to "cherry pick," but has provisions for those who are denied coverage to enroll in the Public Option plan. Under the Single Payer system, there would be no denial because of pre-existing conditions.
Conservatives falsely claim there won't be any choice when government takes over health care, but disregard the reality that under both plans Americans can still choose whoever they wish to be their health care providers. But if the conservatives want to push what they call the terror of "no choice," let them realize that even with excellent private insurance, patients currently have no choice in some situations. Those who go to an emergency room already have no choice of personnel. Except in the smaller hospitals, hospitalized patients, no matter how admitted, usually receive care from anonymous residents and hospitalists who are neither the patient's primary care physician nor the patient's own specialists.
In yet another attempt to scare the working class, the conservatives tell the masses that government-run health care will be as much a boondoggle as the Post Office. But, while every organization has myriad problems, six days a week a member of the working class, a letter carrier, comes to almost every house or business in America and cheerfully delivers the mail on time, stopping occasionally from 10-mile routes to chat.
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