Obama-care Won’t Work: So Why Does He Keep Maligning Universal Care? [View All]

The Washington Post has a sample of an ad Obama in running in Pennsylvania in an attempt to make people afraid of universal health insurance.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/channel-08/

Two problems with it. First, it accuses Hillary of forcing people to buy health insurance whether they can “afford” it or not. There are actually two problems with this first problem. One, here is what Clinton actually said

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/story?id=4235448



Social Security is a tax that all workers pay, so that if they become disabled or are killed, their family members can draw out of the fund. People do not get a choice of opting in or out. Nor are they allowed to opt in or out of Medicare and Social Security retirement. The federal government enacted those programs to take care of the problem of people who could not or would not plan for disability or retirement. The government also makes decisions for people when they are drunk and disorderly on the highway or suicidal---i.e. a danger to themselves.

There is no reason that the nation’s public health during the prime of its adult life should be any different. Right now we make hospital ER’s take them in so that they do not die on the streets. But what happens when they do not die? What happens when they need surgery and chemotherapy?

The second problem with the first problem is that it is the president’s job to make sure that every American can afford health insurance. Or, to put it a different way, America can no longer afford the uninsured.

http://www.results.org/website/article.asp?id=1630

http://www.kff.org/uninsured/upload/The-Cost-of-Care-for-the-Uninsured-What-Do-We-Spend-Who-Pays-and-What-Would-Full-Coverage-Add-to-Medical-Spending.pdf

The first document is a brief summary of statistics. The second is a more in depth discussion of the economics of having some citizens uninsured put together by the Kaiser Foundation. Note that Kaiser estimates that it would cost about $48 billion a year to insure the uninsured, but that the economic cost due to lost wages, decreased productivity etc. is at least twice that. Also note that 26% of all medical care in the U.S. is paid for out of pocket by people with no health insurance---that is $32.6 billion/year. Keep in mind, the Kaiser plan calls for enrolling people into Medicaid. This is different from the candidates’ plans to enroll them in for profit insurance plans, which will be more costly but will keep United Health and Aetna from staging a government coup. ( I think their right to taxpayer funded welfare is written in invisible ink somewhere on the back of the Constitution.)

So, basically, we are spending a minimum of $120 billion a year in out of pocket for piss poor health out comes (since the documents show that uninsured seek health care later and tend to get poorer results) and in lost economic productivity when we could be spending $48 billion for universal health coverage which would give everyone access to preventive care and keep our workforce healthy, cut down on disability and all the economic and family hardship which that causes. This would also reduce the $40 billion in uncompensated hospital care which is now paid out of federal, state or local funds. Since there would be better prevention and since people would have access to physicians, fewer would use the ER as a primary care doctor, so these expenses would go down and what remained would be covered by insurance, causing further savings of tax moneys.

If you add in the long term savings to Medicare (a $260 billion/year insurance program) made possible by universal preventive health care for all citizens designed to help them reach the age of 65 as fit as possible, you can see thatuniversal health insurance actually saves money. There is a reason that the rest of the industrialized world pays less than half per person per year for health care that gives better results than we get in the U.S. It covers everyone all the time.

The second problem Obama claims that by getting insurers to offer some sort of plan to everyone and by offering some sort of government assistance (his add says specifically $2500), everyone in the U.S. who does not have health insurance will go down to Health Insurers R Us and sign up for Obama Care. Obama is wrong.

Here is another Kaiser Foundation document, one that studies trends among the nation’ uninsured.

http://www.kff.org/insurance/upload/7737.pdf

As we might all guess, the more money you make, the more likely you are to purchase individual health insurance for yourself and your family. That makes sense. Also, if you have children, you are more likely to buy it. And, if you are self employed, meaning that you can write off the premiums, you are also more likely to go out and purchase insurance.

Now, for the unexpected, scary part, the part that Obama and his people should have paid attention to when they were writing up their health care policy. Even those people who make over 1000% of the poverty level and who can write off their insurance premiums—of that group only 58% bother with health insurance. If they can not write off the premiums and they make over 1000% of the poverty level that number goes down to 49%.

There are many possible reasons for this observed finding. Some people may have had pre-existing conditions. Some did not “care” about their health. And for some, though insurance might seem affordable to an outsider, the cost of premiums, which can rise up to $10,000/year for a family with parents in the 50s or with members with diseases, might be staggering, even if the family is middle class. (Remember, Obama’s $2500/year covers the premiums for the ideal cherry picked healthy young insured).

Here is a document that goes into more detail about the many reasons that people do not get insurance:

http://statecoverage.net/coverage/why.htm

Pay close attention to this one. A lot of people who do not really understand poverty or what it means to live paycheck to paycheck do not grasp this one:



If you are truly low income, what seems like a “pittance” to a policy wonk who is not really familiar with poverty---say a $100-200/month premium payment for your insurance---may be way beyond the family’s budget. And this is for people with employer sponsored insurance that would pick up 75% of the cost (although as I have written before, the employee really pays for it in reduced wages and benefits). This same worker would almost certainly opt out of Social Security if given a chance, too.

Here is another problem. Many Americans are lazy.



Social Security was designed to address this problem. People did not have to do anything. It was done automatically. Universal health insurance, if it is going to work, needs to be automatic, too, or as close to automatic as the government can make it.

Now, why would anyone offer a universal health care system that is designed to fail? Well, for one thing we know that the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC)----all the pharmaceutical companies and hospitals and durable medical goods manufacturers and makers of MRIs and other medical machinery in this country make insane amounts of money off the nation’s elderly from our Medicare system. Since people get piss poor or no health care in their youth with no prevention, and since they are encouraged to smoke, eat and sit around during their youth developing bad hearts, lungs, joints, kidneys, eyes, by the time they reach the age of retirement, they are ready for the MIC to harvest. There are a bunch of medications, surgeries, treatments, hospitalizations that can be applied to each senior citizen in the United States---all at the expense of the U.S. government.

But universal health insurance as a first step to comprehensive universal health care with investment in a national program of health and disease prevention that targets people when they are young---the kind of initiatives that they have in Japan and other industrialized countries which make their life expectancy longer than ours---that would cut into the profits of the MIC.

So, the Obama Let’s pretend like we are going to insure everyone but don’t and then blame the people when it doesn’t work plan is really really good for the MIC, and it does not hurt the health insurance industry, either, so he should not expect much opposition from either of them as he campaigns for president.

Which seems to be the raison d’etre behind many of his policies. Do not rock the boat.