A Clear, Reasoned Explanation of the Public Health Care Option
Ultra-right Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) says she’s ready to slit her wrist and become blood brothers (?) in a pact to kill health reform.
Personally, I think Americans would be best served, with universal coverage and lower costs, by a single payer plan. But in the absence of any viable campaign for that, the Obama compromise of adding a pubic option to the mix is the best we can hope for. The public option is well-described in this video by Yale Professor Jacob Hacker. Check it out for useful information and corrections to some of the wildly outrageous claims Bachman and her blood (?) brothers are making.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
INTENTIONING
Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women
Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good
The new book from Gloria Feldt about the future, taking the leadership lessons learned from this disruption and creating a better world for all through the power of intention.
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Your book on Choice is exemplary, Gloria. But I would caution that this voice you have opted to put forth is yes, clear, and has the nice Yale backgrounder to get our attention and respect, but….
re reasoned:
It is equally reasoned say that a public option will be a depleter of choice, especially in the long haul.
Those who know how little the two M,s pay (Medicare and Medicaid) understand the danger of a gvt.- run plan keeping what they pay out so low that the “competition:” can not compete.
The erasure of private insurance will only happen over time, but over time that surely WILL happen. Not a single person, who is honest, can tell us that the gvt. plan will never drive out private ins.
The gvt. will dip into taxpayer pockets time and again to keep the public plan in play, even when it is in no way competing fairly with private insurance in what it pays out.
Also, as an excellent voice on women’s choice you should be the first to warn of the dangers, the very very large dangers of having govt. insurance plans determine reproductive care for young women. Repro care is what most young women use their insurance for and our 60/40 Senate will not last!
Anyone who thinks Congress will not fiddle with young women’s choice and birth control options, genetic testing, vaccines, etc. is only fooling themselves, and in my opinion, hurting women’s healthcare in the long haul.
Thanks for the comment, femisex-
I don’t think the professor went far enough. Every health care economist I have read or heard over several decades has said that it is important to get everybody into the pool for health reform to work to achieve universal coverage and cost reduction. I think the president should have put forth a single payer plan with universal coverage. They have also predicted that if there were a single payer plan with a single administrative procedure, we would save about 25% of the current health care expenditures and that would more than cover the uninsured even at the current cost levels. I don’t doubt that private insurance companies would end up profiting from this simply because they have the infrastructure capacity and would have to play a role, albeit a somewhat different one from what they play today.
But that’s my opinion and because the president started out with the public option as an option, the whole debate is already compromised. Today, Ed Schultz suggested turning the current insurance plans into a unified regulated utility. What do you think about that as an option?
I agree with the concerns for women’s reproductive health services. But again, if the president hadn’t started from a compromised position, we would have a better chance of not just assuring full coverage for these services but also rectifying past wrongs, such as getting rid of the Hyde amendment.
The majority of Americans do not want single payer. Medicare is virtually bankrupt. Medicaid is in full bailout mode and Obama still wants to pump millions into that rackety system.
It is time to stop governing from the far left and the far right and come to the center.
Cost savings could be gained from a standardized billing format to all private ins. if laws were enacted to mandate this.
American is a very litigious society, so cost savings WILL be eaten up by millions more coming into a defensive medicine society that is the U.S. The obesity rates in the U.S. make comparisons to other countries very dangerous in terms of cost savings, as well.
Mandates are needed. But that means taxing our health benefits and using that money to get people into private plans. Key word private.
And if Obama and his Congressional majorities can’t (won’t) get Hyde repealed, who in the world thinks it will ever go away? Women of repro age NEED private ins. to insure that they keep the hard fought privacy and coverage they now have.
I could go with the idea of mandated unified intake, processing, and billing formats (all electronically accessible so that an individual does not have to fill them out separately if there is more than one company involved in a claim), complete portability (job to job, state to state, carrier to carrier), and no rejection for pre-existing conditions.
At that point, you might as well have single payer.
There are several reasons why we have high rates of obesity, but I suggest the most significant is the laissez faire philosophy of our health care. Our health care system does not prioritize or make readily available preventive health care including health education. Instead we have an emphasis on curing disease because that’s where the money is. So as long as we have a purely capitalistic health care system, rising costs from such behaviors as obesity won’t change, and a a result the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will continue to rise, the former especially because of our aging boomers.
As to reproductive rights, I think it is time for us to tackle Hyde head on and to do that we have to start by creating a women’s human rights basis for reproductive rights. Griswold, Roe, and privacy aren’t strong enough to do it. But ducking the problem won’t do it either. Sometimes when there is no way to win on a given battlefield, you have to create a bigger one.
Standardized billing would not mean single payer any more than one form fits all would make Fed Ex the Post office. Come on:-) We have standard ICD9 codes and they translate nicely btw private and public.
Electronic Medical records can easily drive up costs and compromise privacy, so they are no panacea. (Fever of unknown etiology, auto check box, whew $500 vs. an overpriced $5 Tylenol for a post-surgical temp. spike. (Remember that $5 Tylenol is also paying for the Medicaid pt in the next room.)
Re Obesity, by that measure smoking would be the fault of the health care system the treats lung cancer (now with a rather nifty new drug) vs. gets folks to stop smoking. Ever been to socialized countries where smoking is endemic? Comeon, we are fat for many reasons, but blaming our ins. system if not really realistic. A college education is the key to better health habits.
I wholly agree that we need to talk about and address repro choice as a human rights issue!!!!!!!!!!
But we have Mr. Obama thumbing his nose at FOCA and telling us all that abortion is a “moral tragedy.” Game on!
The very sad truth is that the Democrats know that abortion tethers women to the Blue party and they are terrified of women migrating to the Red side. Social libs, fiscal conservatives. To keep such women in Blue territory certain male Dems play hockey with women’s repro rights. Tim Kaine was used exactly this way as a key player in this DNC/ Obama uterine punt. It is shameful. The key to female repro freedoms as a human right is to bring pro-choice women into the Red party in large and clamorous numbers. Isolating them to Blue party just keeps us keeping on with the great battle of the womb!
PS, the Daily Kos is the most sexist place on earth. REally?? Kosistanians are femicidieans.