Commentary: Frightening future if health reform fails

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/18/reinhardt.health.inflation/index.html

Commentary: Frightening future if health reform fails

By Uwe Reinhardt
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Uwe Reinhardt is James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. From 1986 to 1995 he served as a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Committee, established in 1986 by Congress to advise it on issues related to the payment of physicians.


(CNN) -- Watching the angry outbursts at town hall meetings on health reform and the continuing public ambivalence about current efforts to reform our health system almost makes me wish that the reform effort fails.

Perhaps Americans need to be taught a basic lesson on the economics of employment-based health insurance before they will feel as smugly secure with it as they do now and before they will stop nitpicking health-reform efforts to death over this or that detail.

And America's currently insured middle class will be increasingly desperate if health reform fails. Millions more such families will see their take-home pay shrink. Millions will lose their employment-based insurance, especially in medium and small-sized firms. And millions will find themselves inexorably priced out of health care as we know it.

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Here it must be remembered that the wages and salaries of the solid American middle class have been relatively stagnant in recent years and are likely to remain so for the next decade. Unemployment is not likely to fall significantly soon, regardless of what stock prices do on Wall Street. Indeed, often stock prices rise as firms lay off workers to drive up profits through leaner payrolls.

This prospect -- relatively stagnant family incomes combined with family health-care costs that double every decade -- is what America's middle class should contemplate as it thinks about the imperative of health reform.

It is a pity that this central issue seems to have been shoved aside by mendacious distortions from Sarah Palin, Betsy McCaughey, Rush Limbaugh and other extremist commentators seeking to frighten Americans with their prattle about "death panels" and "pulling plugs on granny" that no bill before Congress even remotely envisions.

who have been bitching about 'government run healthcare'. I don't want to hear it. If they say anything about the costs going up again, i will have to reply, oh well, this is what you wanted.

order how wrong they were.

get in on that federal plan. and i think that there are rules in NY that make the insurance companies cover certain things and they probably can't drop you... at least in an employer based plan anyway. I assume that because of the horror stories i am hearing from other states. My brother smokes... and his wife is overweight and has asthma. their son has asthma too, i think. I'd hate to see what would happen if we were in some of these states that seem to let the insurance companies do whatever they want.

.... What may lie a few years down the road could be a lot worse, if this opportunity is wasted.

The time for change is NOW!