Main Street

Yet Another Reason We Need the Public Option

There are a lot of reasons we need a public health insurance option. A lot. And some unbelievable number of them have to do with costs: The costs of private insurance. The costs we’re left paying even if we have insurance. The cost of care for people without insurance.

But at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman points to another one: Security.

The single-payer and hybrid systems in place in every other country in the developed world have many admirable features: lower costs, universal coverage, and better health outcomes. But what ought to make us most envious is their security — it’s what they have and we desperately need. If you live in Canada or Germany or France or Japan, there are some things you need never fear. You need never fear that your insurance company will tell you it won’t cover treatment for your asthma because you had asthma before they signed you up. You need never fear that you will bankrupt your family because of expensive treatments for a serious illness. You need never fear that you will find yourself without coverage after your insurer dropped you or you lost your job. You might fear getting sick, but you won’t fear that your life will be destroyed by not being able to pay for getting sick.

In the United States, unless you’re over 65, extremely poor, or a veteran — thus, already covered by a government health insurance plan — you do have to fear all that. That’s because the central pathology of our deeply pathological health-care system is that most of us have no choice but to get health coverage from an entity whose sole reason for being is to take our money and then try to avoid paying for our care when we get sick.

I’ve previously written about the practice of rescission, in which insurance companies “insure” people right up until they get sick. The insurance companies take people’s money, month after month and year after year, and then when the person needs it most, the insurance company finds a way to declare them ineligible and yank their coverage. That’s only one of what Waldman refers to as the insurance companies’ “most despicable business practices” that keep us from health care security. We just aren’t going to get health care right until we have a viable alternative to private insurance companies.

Tags: Health Care