Health care round-up

I confess to being torn on health care. The currently debated plan will benefit damned few people, but it may benefit me, if any sort of public option survives. Yet that which helps me will hurt the Democratic party and will re-consign liberalism to the outhouse of American political discourse. Taxes will rise on the wealthy, which the media will spin as raised taxes for everyone. The costs of health care will not go down. The average person will fare no better -- may, in fact, fare worse.

From the Nation:

The powerful insurance and private health-care lobbies, which fear honest competition as the vampire does the stake, are going to do everything in their power to accomplish three things:

1. Scare Americans with hypocritical talk about the hefty price-tag for a getting a robust public plan off the ground.

2. Undermine the structural supports for a public plan so that it cannot compete -- effectively turning it into a sub-standard "alternative" that will appeal only to those who have no other options.

3. Fiddle with the overall "reform" so that most of the taxpayer money that is expended streams into the accounts of private firms.

Done, done and done.

And their task is being made easier by in-the-pocket "Democrats" like Montana Senator Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, who is collecting huge contributions from hospitals, insurers and medical interest groups in return for doing their dirty work. If it was just Baucus, that would be a problem.

Here's Paul Krugman, who argues that "free market" solutions -- which can work just fine when it comes to potato chips, DVDs and dog grooming services -- do not, cannot, and never will work in the field of health insurance:

This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.

This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems.

The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (“I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”)

Representative Anthony Weiner, who is bravely trying to replace Obama's approach with single-payer, argues that the debate is structured around a kind of fiction:

This time, we are arguing over the so-called public option.

The phrase has become something of a Rorschach test for lobbyists, commentators and legislators. To the president and to bill writers in Congress, the public option has come to mean that a government-run plan is the only way to truly keep private insurance companies honest, by guaranteeing that at least one provider is focused on something more than the bottom line.

To insurance company lobbyists and — from the sound of it — nearly every Republican, the public option is more a confirmation of their fear that the Obama administration is out to nationalize another industry. They argue that the public option would soon become the only option because it would have too many advantages in the marketplace.

Without acknowledging it, both sides seem to agree with the argument for a single-payer system. But instead of having a debate about its value, both sides have turned the idea into an odd punching bag. The right uses the term “single-payer” to condemn the White House approach, while the White House — and my colleagues in the House and Senate — quickly decry the scurrilous charge and concoct legislative language to make their public option look less, well, public.

Implicit in the Democratic plan — and the Republican opposition to it — is a tacit recognition that single-payer health plans like Medicare are the best way to go.

Ian Welsh:

For me it started at TARP time when Obama pushed through Paulson’s highway robbery act Then Obama hired Geithner and Summers as his key economic people. So I started down the path of “no hope” a lot earlier than most bloggers.

...it may well be worse than nothing even if a weak public option is in the bill. In particularly Medicare and Medicaid are being hit to pay for this, people will have deductibles on “non preventative” care (and maybe preventative by the time it gets through) and so on. The Massachussets experience, which is the closest parallel, has not been good.

I’m not a single payor purist, though I think the fact single payer isn’t even on the table is a terrible indictment of the system—however, I’ll settle for a good public option, or even a non-sucky one. But I’m becoming convinced that any public option will either be too compromised, or non existent, and at that point, all that happens is you have slashes to Medicare and Medicaid, forced purchase of bad insurance, and through those purchases more money being pumped into the system.

Is forcing people to buy insurance the real goal? The best way to make money, bar none, is to have government force people to buy your product.

Let those words sink in. Here is the product that Obama wants to force you to buy.

Which leaves me with one question: Why is the health insurance industry spending so much money ($1.4 million a day, by one estimate) to knock down Obama's plan?