Socialized Medicine – the People are Speaking – They Don’t Want It
Remember 1993 and health care? It was doomed because Americans did not want Big Government running one more part of their lives. Why? Because Government doesn’t do things very well – it’s as simple as that.
They – the Government – euphemistically refer to its proposed health care plan as simply one option in the public/private marketplace. But we – the people – know what that plan really is. It is socialized medicine.
So here we are again, sixteen years later, and Washington seems to have forgotten the lesson handed to the Clinton Administration. Or maybe it is finally sinking in – now that Congressmen/women and Senators have gone home and faced the tidal wave of anger, wrath and ire – you name it – from their constituents.
There are some issues in health care that really do need fixing and the Obama Administration could win big time if it would only address them.
First and foremost – tort reform!!! Why doesn’t Congress deal with tort reform? Why isn’t that simple? In all the rhetoric emanating from our Capitol, not a word on the subject – not from President Obama, not from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, not from Senator Dodd, not even from the vast majority of Republicans! Why? Okay – we all know the answer – it’s about the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ lobby. But really and truly – how many millions could they possibly have paid into the coffers of our legislators to make the subject so taboo?
Why doesn’t Bill O’Reilly or Chris Matthews or Larry Kudlow or Jim Lehrer do a serious interview with both Republican and Democrat lawmakers and grill them on the subject of tort reform? We – the rest of us Americans – are dying to hear the rationale for Congress’ deafening silence on this critical matter.
True tort reform would reduce the costs of medicine and would go a long way to helping people afford the premiums so many say are the reason they do buy health insurance.
A second easy fix – pre-existing conditions should have no bearing on a person’s ability to get health insurance. That is not only good policy but it is a matter of ethics. It is simple to do – it’s just a one line item. And it won’t run into much controversy and debate because even those who might oppose it know that it is the right thing to do.
The American way of life – the foundation of our success as a nation and an economy – prefers personal decision-making over Big Government edicts. Our not very long history as a nation is steeped in that doctrine. The hue and cry being voiced by people of all parties, religions, ways of life and financial means is ignored by our Government at its own risk – the risk of being voted out of office.
Tags: government, Health Care, Politics
August 10th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
If the insurance companies’ special interest groups would stop sending “rabble-rousers” to the Democrats’ town meetings, maybe we would discover that the Democrats have some very good points. But when these meetings are deliberately disrupted with screaming and yelling, obviously the President’s message cannot come across, and the rabble-rousers’ message becomes the story. The voice of the rabble-rousers is not the voice of the people.
I would suggest checking out the White House’s web site for a more accurate explanation of the proposed plan.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/?e=10&ref=text2
August 10th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
To paraphrase Churchill: public healthcare is the worst form of healthcare except all those other forms that have been tried.
I don’t anyone disagrees that adding the government in will create a large bureaucracy, but per capita spending on healthcare exceeds any other western country, for a healthcare system consistently rated last among industrialised nations. I’m not sure that one can really claim the private sector always knows best.
Oh, and the people already have socialised medicine – it’s just not widespread. The army, for example, has an excellent government-run system that it provides for veterans.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
If the insurance companies’ special interest groups would stop sending “rabble-rousers” to the Democrats’ town meetings, maybe we would discover that the Democrats have some very good points. But when these meetings are deliberately disrupted with screaming and yelling, obviously the President’s message cannot come across, and the rabble-rousers’ message becomes the story. The voice of the rabble-rousers is not the voice of the people.
I would suggest checking out the White House’s web site for a more accurate explanation of the proposed plan.
August 12th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
“Remember 1993 and health care? It was doomed because Americans did not want Big Government running one more part of their lives. Why? Because Government doesn’t do things very well – it’s as simple as that.”
What does that mean? These often heard statements are the anthem of many free market cultists but are they true? Perhaps true, in many specific cases, but in the main, false.
As one who participated in the last healthcare reform exercise (1993) as a lobbyist in Washington, I remember it well and knew — partly from daily reading of polls and focus group data commissioned at the time on behalf of clients, that it was doomed for two quite different reasons: public fear and the money to stoke it. In short, the public was reacting with hostility to (1) the fact that the policy making process was not transparent and (2) the tens of millions of dollars in TV advertising the insurance industry spent to popularize the fictitious, alarmist conversations of “Harry and Louise” to block any consideration of reform — ANY consideration.
Did the American people reject the idea of changing the healthcare environment? Hardly.
Then as now a fretful and easily misled public actually sought change but soon came to distrust the method. The First Lady announced that the deliberations would be conducted in secret as she took high handed charge of crafting a solution for what was then — as it is today, one of the top three concerns of over 87% of Americans earning less than $300k per annum.
Then came the Gingrich-led takeover of the House which began strongly but faltered over a GOP scheme to privatize as much of the government’s functions as could be done without the public understanding the agenda and before murder and mahem could envelope the Capitol. Slogans such as “It’s your money” and “Don’t let government into your lives” and the like helped cook up a stew of confusion and fear. Retirees were telling the pollsters that what they valued most was there personal, red white and blue American socialism: Medicare and Social Security. These two government-run programs worked for them, offering a little predictability and security where the private markets couldn’t.
The upshot of all the sloganeering and fear was a stand-off between President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich that led to the shutdown of the government. The GOP, fearing the rising wrath of seniors whose Medicare and Social Security might be affected under their wondrous “Contract for America” experiment, blinked first.
Skipping ahead, look at what wonders reining in the role of government has wrought. (Three new books delve into this amazing story, the best of which may be from Gillian Tett, a reporter for the Financial Times: “FOOL’S GOLD”). Thanks to the systematic weakening of the hand of government as pushed by the White House (and abetted by congressional indifference), restraining oversight and regulation, so-called unfettered capitalism blossomed fully as the most spectacular economic success of the Bush administration – success, loosely defined, is premised here on the idea that the record shattering returns produced by avarice and deceit in the financial markets that enriched the big players on Wall Street while bringing on the financial collapse of ’08, was, as the natural outcome the GOP model predicted, the logical achievement of free markets.
The restraining hand of government was nudged aside. New investment products were bundled and sold which Congress and the public were told shouldn’t be regulated, old instruments were repackaged for opaque new purposes and a fabulously well funded lobbying operation was maintained to keep things going that way; this was game that paid some people wonderfully well and nicked – or in many instances, wrecked the retirements of most everyone else.
It was apparent by December ’08 that the raging grannies of ’93 were right, after all.
So, was government the cause of the economic meltdown or was it the ideologically blinkered belief that free markets always know best?
Apparently, Americans believe passionately in government when it enters their lives in the form of life-saving Medicare and Social Security. These conspicuous socialisms, one copied from Otto von Bismarck’s late nineteenth century experiment in making a newly unified Germany more civilized, and the other the crowning creation of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda, were hatched amid the muttering of free market cultists, the true blue practitioners of modern Calvinism, who saw in them a mushy indulgence that would reward indolence at the expense of robust capitalism. Few Americans feel so today, despite the impression you might get from the incessant TV coverage of agitators at town meetings where they show up to scream invectives and titillate the camera crews by suppressing discourse.
If President Obama increasingly challenges the deceitful scares from the wing nuts that garner most of the TV coverage, the older generation, whatever its fears, will rally to his reassuring message of prudent change. They are deep into the practical needs that come with creeping decrepitude so socialism as an epithet does not deflect them. (August is invariably a slow news month and it serves the networks well to have confrontations as prime time reality shows, broadcasting rote banalities, echoes of the last campaign whose outcome, in effect, they are protesting: all of which proves yet again that “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”) Whatever else may cloud their horizon as we lurch toward healthcare reform, our senior citizens are not loosening their enduring embrace of their personal socialism.
But what about the gruesome specter that is foreign healthcare? As one who has had the benefit of healthcare in foreign lands, I’m puzzled that so much utter bunk on the topic passes without objection in the press. Ignorance is a big part of it: laziness in reporting also helps. Wildly inaccurate descriptions of how other comparably developed nations heal their own are used to frame an argument where the boogeyman, “Horrible Foreign Healthcare System,” is posed as the vicious monster waiting to swallow all those who stray from the wondrous marvel we have in the form of our healthcare insurance industry. “The best in the world” is a false characterization of what we have, by all credible accounts, including mine. But don’t take my word for it. Search the web and see what you find that’s believable.
Or have a look at “Family Values, American Style” at the website of the Huffington Post to get a sense of how ex-pat Americans view they nonsense being spewed about Germany, the UK, France and others. Given a choice between my wife’s recent experience in a fine New Jersey hospital (“Affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania”) and my own experience including that of my children in the UK, France Germany or Monaco, I’ll take any of those foreign options first.
The easy slur about how inept government is and how it shouldn’t be involved in our lives is gainsaid in important areas by overwhelming evidence. Sure, any taxpayer funded bureaucracy can be slothful, indifferent and inept on any given day. But so are countless hospitals, clinics and other for-profit institutions, never mind the driving incentive to reduce cost, including avoiding needed treatment and taking on the infirm who are demonstrable money losers. What matters is the form, mission and oversight of government function. Without stern accountability, any organization soon degenerates, no matter its sponsor or original purpose.
Sociologists tell us that empathy and those other humane values we hold to be the markers of a civilized society, are learned, not inherited. Darwin’s model of survival by adaptation leaves no room for considerations of moral value unless they favor a winner. The free market is Darwinism applied to investment and that’s as it should be because the premise of investing is the promise of return. But when economic Darwinism is applied to entities whose mission is BOTH to provide care to alleviate suffering and sustain life and also to provide a return to the shareholder as is expected to retain the investment, the less compelling value loses. In our society that’s not the investor.
And that’s precisely what is worrying the raging grannies. That is why the fraudulent characterization of an Senate ammendment (from a Republican Senator, by the way) as establishing “death panels” to decide the value of impaired human life and allocations initially resonated to harshly. Elderly people fear being seen as marginal social contributors and disposable remnants. Their fear derives logically from the prinicples inherent in the dominant free enterprise model of commercial healthcare: they fret, correctly, that isn’t much profit to be made off them. They’re alarmed by the obvious and fundamental choice the commercial industry refuses to discuss: limiting risk versus maximizing profit. Risk, of course, is otherwise known as Neil and Nancy, Marvin and Mabel, Bob and Valerie. In a democracy their leverage is their voice.
That is why, in the recent hearing before teh Heathcare Subcommitte in the House, it was revealing to hear how the commercial enterprise that took over Blue Cross and Blue Shield in parts of CA chose between its policyholders and its investors: the clue was its practice of giving big bonuses to staff who achieved the highest rates of service denials. For example, the highest achievers were the employees who identified and tracked women with breast cancer in remission, on the correct bet that recurrence in these ladies was a higher risk than the loss of their premium payments: the solution was to search out some oversight or technical mistake in their enrollment applications as far back as six years and just cut them loose. The money saved in this way was celebrated in email traffic that clearly implied the blessing of management, in turn a reliable harbinger of large financial blessings for assiduous service to the company and its shareholders. No bonuses were paid for empathy: no profit there.
The idea behind “denial of coverage because of a pre-existing condition” is a perfectly logical and economically appropriate response to illness among policyholders. It also makes plain what the trade-off really is, such that people unfettered by free enterprise cultism, can reconsider the horrid impact of a patently inhumane bet.
As long as the urgency of profit overshadows the mission of care, insurance companies can prosper. However, when providing care overtakes the acceptability of denying care, change is imminent. Which is why for the first time ever the insurance companies are mouthing new pieties about eliminating the exclusion for pre-existing conditions — without explaining where the financial offsets will be found. Is it a sincere offer? No matter. Soon it is going to be too late for another slick sleight-of-hand. The raging grannies are seeing to that.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
(From Shakespear’s Julius Ceasar, Act IV, Scene ii.)
Hmm. A basis for optimism.
August 13th, 2009 at 7:23 am
In haste to join this important discussion, I overlooked several mistakes that are corrected in the text below:
“Remember 1993 and health care? It was doomed because Americans did not want Big Government running one more part of their lives. Why? Because Government doesn’t do things very well – it’s as simple as that.”
What does that mean? These often heard statements are the anthem of many free market theory purists — some are cultists, but are the declarations true? Perhaps true in many specific cases, but in the main, false.
As one who participated in the last healthcare reform exercise (1993) as a lobbyist in Washington, I remember it well and knew — partly from daily reading of polls and focus group data commissioned at the time on behalf of clients, that it was doomed for two quite different reasons: public fear and the money to stoke it. In short, the public was reacting with hostility to (1) the fact that the policy making process was not transparent and (2) the tens of millions of dollars in TV advertising the insurance industry spent to popularize the fictitious, alarmist conversations of “Harry and Louise” to block any consideration of reform — ANY consideration.
Did the American people reject the idea of changing the healthcare environment? Hardly.
Then as now a fretful and easily misled public actually sought change but soon came to distrust the method. The First Lady announced that the deliberations would be conducted in secret as she took high handed charge of crafting a solution for what was then — as it is today, one of the top three concerns of over 87% of Americans earning less than $300k per annum.
Then came the Gingrich-led takeover of the House which began strongly but faltered over a GOP scheme to privatize as much of the government’s functions as could be done without the public understanding the agenda and before murder and mahem could envelope the Capitol. Slogans such as “It’s your money” and “Don’t let government into your lives” and the like helped cook up a stew of confusion and fear. Retirees were telling the pollsters that what they valued most was their personal, red white and blue American “socialism”: Medicare and Social Security. These two government-run programs worked for them, offering a little predictability and security where the private markets couldn’t.
The upshot of all the sloganeering and fear was a stand-off between President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich that led to the shutdown of the government. The GOP, fearing the rising wrath of seniors whose Medicare and Social Security might be affected under their wondrous “Contract for America” experiment, blinked first.
Skipping ahead, look at what wonders reining in the role of government has wrought. (Three new books delve into this amazing story, the best of which may be from Gillian Tett, a reporter for the Financial Times: “FOOL’S GOLD”). Thanks to the systematic weakening of the hand of government as pushed by the White House (and abetted by congressional indifference), restraining oversight and regulation, so-called unfettered capitalism blossomed fully as the most spectacular economic success of the Bush administration – success, loosely defined, is premised here on the idea that the record shattering returns produced by avarice and deceit in the financial markets that enriched the big players on Wall Street while bringing on the financial collapse of ’08, was, as the natural outcome the GOP model predicted, the logical achievement of free markets.
The restraining hand of government was nudged aside. New investment products were bundled and sold which Congress and the public were told shouldn’t be regulated, old instruments were repackaged for opaque new purposes and a fabulously well funded lobbying operation was maintained to keep things going that way; this was game that paid some people wonderfully well and nicked – or in many instances, wrecked the retirements of most everyone else.
It was apparent by December ’08 that the raging grannies of ’93 were right, after all.
So, was government the cause of the economic meltdown or was it the ideologically blinkered belief that free markets always know best?
Apparently, Americans believe passionately in government when it enters their lives in the form of life-saving Medicare and Social Security. These conspicuous socialisms, one copied from Otto von Bismarck’s late nineteenth century experiment in making a newly unified Germany more civilized, and the other the crowning creation of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda, were hatched amid the muttering of free market cultists, the true blue practitioners of modern Calvinism, who saw in them a mushy indulgence that would reward indolence at the expense of robust capitalism. Few Americans feel so today, despite the impression you might get from the incessant TV coverage of agitators at town meetings where they show up to scream invectives and titillate the camera crews by suppressing discourse.
If President Obama increasingly challenges the deceitful scares from the wing nuts that garner most of the TV coverage, the older generation, whatever its fears, will rally to his reassuring message of prudent change. They are deep into the practical needs that come with creeping decrepitude so socialism as an epithet does not deflect them. (August is invariably a slow news month and it serves the networks well to have confrontations as prime time reality shows, broadcasting rote banalities, echoes of the last campaign whose outcome, in effect, they are protesting: all of which proves yet again that “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”) Whatever else may cloud their horizon as we lurch toward healthcare reform, our senior citizens are not loosening their enduring embrace of their personal socialism.
But what about the gruesome specter that is foreign healthcare? As one who has had the benefit of healthcare in foreign lands, I’m puzzled that so much utter bunk on the topic passes without objection in the press. Ignorance is a big part of it: laziness in reporting also helps. Wildly inaccurate descriptions of how other comparably developed nations heal their own are used to frame an argument where the boogeyman, “Horrible Foreign Healthcare System,” is posed as the vicious monster waiting to swallow all those who stray from the wondrous marvel we have in the form of our healthcare insurance industry. “The best in the world” is a false characterization of what we have, by all credible accounts, including mine. But don’t take my word for it. Search the web and see what you find that’s believable.
Or have a look at “Family Values, American Style” at the website of the Huffington Post to get a sense of how ex-pat Americans view they nonsense being spewed about Germany, the UK, France and others. Given a choice between my wife’s recent experience in a fine New Jersey hospital (“Affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania”) and my own experience including that of my children in the UK, France Germany or Monaco, I’ll take any of those foreign options first.
The easy slur about how inept government is and how it shouldn’t be involved in our lives is gainsaid in important areas by overwhelming evidence. Sure, any taxpayer funded bureaucracy can be slothful, indifferent and inept on any given day. But so are countless hospitals, clinics and other for-profit institutions, never mind the driving incentive to reduce cost, including avoiding needed treatment and taking on the infirm who are demonstrable money losers. What matters is the form, mission and oversight of government function. Without stern accountability, any organization soon degenerates, no matter its sponsor or original purpose.
Sociologists tell us that empathy and those other humane values we hold to be the markers of a civilized society, are learned, not inherited. Darwin’s model of survival by adaptation leaves no room for considerations of moral value unless they favor a winner. The free market is Darwinism applied to investment and that’s as it should be because the premise of investing is the promise of return. But when economic Darwinism is applied to entities whose mission is BOTH to provide care to alleviate suffering and sustain life and also to provide a return to the shareholder as is expected to retain the investment, the less compelling value loses. In our society that’s not the investor.
And that’s precisely what is worrying the raging grannies. That is why the fraudulent characterization of a Senate amendment (from a Republican Senator, by the way) as establishing “death panels” to decide the value of impaired human life initially resonated so harshly. Elderly people fear being seen as marginal social contributors and disposable remnants. Their fear derives logically from the principles inherent in the dominant free enterprise model of commercial healthcare: they fret, correctly, that there isn’t much profit to be made off them. They’re alarmed by the obvious and fundamental choice the commercial industry refuses to discuss: limiting risk versus maximizing profit. Risk, of course, is otherwise known as Neil and Nancy, Marvin and Mabel, Bob and Valerie. In a democracy their leverage is their voice.
That is why, in the recent hearing before the Healthcare Subcommittee in the House, it was revealing to hear how the commercial enterprise that took over Blue Cross and Blue Shield in parts of CA chose between its policyholders and its investors: the clue was its practice of giving big bonuses to staff who achieved the highest rates of service denials. For example, the highest achievers were the employees who identified and tracked women with breast cancer in remission, on the correct bet that recurrence in these ladies was a higher risk than the loss of their premium payments: the solution was to search out some oversight or technical mistake in their enrollment applications as far back as six years and just cut them loose. The money saved in this way was celebrated in email traffic that clearly implied the blessing of management, in turn a reliable harbinger of large financial blessings for assiduous service to the company and its shareholders. No bonuses were paid for empathy: no profit there.
The idea behind “denial of coverage because of a pre-existing condition” is a perfectly logical and economically appropriate response to illness among policyholders. It also makes plain what the trade-off really is, such that people unfettered by free enterprise cultism, can reconsider the horrid impact of a patently inhumane bet.
As long as the urgency of profit overshadows the mission of care, insurance companies can prosper. However, when providing care overtakes the acceptability of denying care, change is imminent. Which is why for the first time ever the insurance companies are mouthing new pieties about eliminating the exclusion for pre-existing conditions — without explaining where the financial offsets will be found. Is it a sincere offer? No matter. Soon it is going to be too late for another slick sleight-of-hand. The raging grannies are seeing to that.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
(From Shakespear’s Julius Ceasar, Act IV, Scene iii.)
Hmm. A basis for optimism.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Bravo, Michael! That was eloquent!
August 13th, 2009 at 9:58 am
An ignorant public is a demagogue’s play pen.
For months we’ve heard about the atrocious and inhumane healthcare that our friends in Canada and the EU must suffer under their “socialistic” systems. As mentioned in the blog entry last night, these claims go uncontested because most public officials simply aren’t familiar with those systems, journalists generally aren’t aware of the truth or their assignment goes no futher than reporting/repeating the fraudulent posturing of bombastic right wingers and the industry lobbies that fund the groups promoting the attacks have no interest in the truth, only in defeating reform.
In today’s Washington Post, Britons are saying they have heard enough. A brief excerpt: ‘Hamish Meldrum, the chairman of the British Medical Association, said in a statement Wednesday that he has been dismayed by the “jaw-droppingly untruthful attacks” by some American critics.’
The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee who is supposedly leading the examination of the issue sinvolved, said this week to a crowd in Boise Idaho that he’s been told Senator Kennedy’s brain tumor would not merit continued care in the UK because he’d be judged too old to merit the attention.
This astounding falsehood has been trumpeted by the GOP FAX network and insurance industry-allied front groups: on cue, fearful, gullible and some hateful citizens react with outrage that the US Congress would contemplate adopting British unhumanity. (No mention is made of the universal care available alongside opulent private programs for those who want and are willing to pay for them.)
The emminent scientist, Stephen Hawking, who yesterday was awarded the Presidential medal of Freedom, is said (by GOP FAX Network and others) to be ineligible for the elaborate sustaining care he requires were he in the British system. Of course, he IS a Brit and he IS in the British National Health Service and, as he indignantly said, he owes his life to the NHS for the quality and sustained care it has provided him his entire life.
Similar falsehoods proliferate about the German, French and Canadian systems, all of them allegedly rationing care to those judged by the state to be viable and therefore investment worthy. Sarah Palin’s rant about “death panels” that could judge the investment worthiness of the impaired, the old and infirm plaid on this pernicious theme.
When will the demagogic propaganda cease? As soon as there is no chance of reforming the system we have now in which profit trumps suffering and even life.
For further edification, please go to the Washington Post’s website and enter the headline “Health-Reform Rhetoric Gets Personal for Britons”.
Many of us who welcome dialogue and debate on all issues all the time will take the opponents of healthcare reform seriously the day they return to the concept that enlightenment and empathy rather than volume and violence are the object.
October 15th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Michale Moore is a movie maker. Talk to me Patricia!!!
He is not hypocrite because Capitalism is helping the few good (like him) and many bad top managements who brought the country to the brink of total collapse. He is willing to lose his share of good capitalism as long as the bad boys lose theirs
“the big banks are the ones that employ all the people at the bottom of the pyramid, so if people follow his absurd advice, the unemployment rate will rise, not fall”
Answer – That is a dumb argument. Big banks employ more because they are big. When we kill them by taking money out and putting in many small banks, these small banks will hire the unemployed from the big banks. Duh!! Patricia, your argument shows how clueless you are.
“Maria challenged him, pointing out that the pension and 401K plans of millions of Americans have benefitted from the stock market over the years.”
Answer – People made no money in the last 10 years and the stock market produces much less than what it would produce in 401Ks etc IF the corprate top managements did not overpay themselves, did an honest job of cultivating good corporate culture and did not take undue risk.