Win the battle, then the war
About a month ago, Ezra Klein hit on something important. The current fight over health care isn’t the end of this struggle, but the beginning. It is the first major battle in a long war to help us all get reliable care, and keep health care waste from bankrupting all of us.
The opposition to reform has been blatantly dishonest about even the most basic facts. That pattern will certainly continue. Once reforms pass, the result will be a mix of helpful changes and ongoing problems. Some positive changes will be fast, while others will slowly develop over years. Most of them won’t make for sexy media stories. Meanwhile, ideologues will suddenly blame ongoing problems with our current system on “Obamacare”, even as the reforms slowly work to correct some of those problems. Think about the economic meltdown as a model: Wall Street tanked the global economy and held it for ransom (a.k.a. bailouts). We lost our jobs because of them, and then they blamed working people for it. It worked, so now they’re inflating the next bubble. This time, it looks like life insurance is the pick. Special interests will try to do the same thing with health care. They’ll blame the problems on the people who are fixing them, in order to keep them from being fixed.
Last night, I talked to a member whose experience sheds a lot of light on where we are, and where we’re headed. She got sick and lost her coverage. Now she has a “pre-existing condition”, and can’t get insurance as a result. One provider told her she’d have to be on their highly expensive plan for 18 months before she could get any benefits. Presumably, they were betting she’d die in the meantime. She is bitterly angry at the insurance industry for what it has done to her, but she is just barely above the threshold to get public assistance. She’s trapped between the cracks of a broken machine. Some have hinted that she could get care if she divorced her husband … but she isn’t willing to do that. This is the sort of indignity and abuse that people suffer, and it seems to be coming from all sides. Forced to go to the emergency room as her only option, she hates that it is so expensive for taxpayers, and that she doesn’t get the full care she needs. She hates the way the staff looks at her with disdain, like she shouldn’t be there clogging up the emergency room. She’s just fighting for her life. Government and corporate bureaucrats seem to be colluding to humiliate her and deny her coverage…all so that they can force her to waste money in the emergency room. She strongly supports a public option, but is worried that it will still be too expensive once all the political maneuvering is done. And she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to afford her mandated coverage, or if she’ll slip through the cracks again. That would be a real problem for her, for countless people in this situation, and for the entire reform effort.
We all need to keep her in mind. A strong public option will help address these concerns, but what happens if D.C. insiders pass a weakened public option to appease the insurance lobby? Or what happens when entrenched interests decide to blame these problems on the people who are fixing them, in an effort to stop them from being fixed? We will keep advocating for real people, and keep pushing real reform forward, even after this bill. Inevitably, there will be opposition from those who are cashing in on our suffering. We’ll make it through this battle with a helpful but compromised piece of legislation that doesn’t do everything it needs to do. We will keep fighting as long as people are being humiliated and bankrupted by a system that is supposed to be making them well.
Tags: Health Care, health care reform
This what they’ve been doing to us – the people – for years. If you’re “lucky” (or should that be if THEY are lucky?) they catch you in a trap where you can still work but have to survive a pre-existing condition period for them or an employer plan. Many people have been forced onto Medicaid or Medicare due to disability from denied care – complete with the associated total poverty. That “Public Health” is in many places either non-existent or – worse still – requires insurance, only makes one or the other of these outcomes happen faster. Personally, I fell into the trap where I hit a “Public Health” that required insurance, didn’t have it, got forced onto Medicaid which meant being declared disabled and 6 years later the only things changed are a few SSDI COLA increases (that, of course, never really matched inflation) and Medicaid changed to Medicare.
What I’d like to know – and I’m sure she would too – is when are our leaders going to do something about this? These are things that civilized nations don’t let happen to anyone. According to the UN, health care is SUPPOSED to be a human right. Instead, it’s being held captive by greedy insurance companies in our country.
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Thanks for posting and sharing your story, too. So true. Even the worst plans get rid of the ability of insurance companies to deny you because of pre-existing conditions. But of course, they’ll try to get around those rules. That’s why a public option needs to be there as an alternative when they do. There are a lot of leaders in Congress who are doing the right thing. The problem is the ones who are selling out to the insurance lobby and calling it “moderation”. I talk to a lot of moderates and conservatives. I don’t know anyone in the real world who defines selling out to corporate bureaucrats as “moderation”. That’s D.C. speak for screwing us over. Same as it ever was, our politicians will do just as much for us as we make them do … so let’s organize
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I located a good article in the Huffington Post,” Top Five Reasons the Baucus is Really, Really Bad”. Besides having no public option, the plan destroys the risk pool, taxes benefits, and denies co-ops the ability to negotiate drug prices and healthcare services. It doesn’t just talk about the access big pharma and the health insurance industry has to Max Baucus and the Finance Committee.
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