Category: health care Page 31 of 35

Edit: oops.  I’m full of it.  Misread the poll.  In fact it indicates the opposite of my title.  Ignore the below.  Perhaps the public option will be fantastically popular.

The problem with public option polling is that the questions imply strongly that everyone has access to it.  In fact, most people don’t have access to it (if, for example, your employer offers insurance you can’t opt out and go to the public option.)  Kip Sullivan did a bit of investigating and found a poll which actually did inform Americans of this fact (h/t Corrente):

“Would you support or oppose having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans?”
Support: 55%
Oppose:42%
Unsure: 3%

If oppose/unsure: “What if this government-sponsored plan was available only to people who cannot get health insurance from a private insurer? In that case, would you support or oppose it?”
Support: 21%
Oppose: 24%

That’s quite the difference, don’t you think?  As I noted in my last post, voters are going to be furious with Democrats if they pass any of the current proposed health care “reform” bills. The public option in all of them is crippled and the subsidies are low, such that they will eat as much as 1/3 to a half of many people’s disposable income.

Because the public option proposed in any of these bills is not robust, since they won’t have enough enrollment to have market pricing power, and thus won’t be able to force down costs, there is no reason to believe that health care reform will actually contain health cost increases below inflation, let alone below wage increases.

Since the bills also force people to buy insurance, that means voters will be forced to buy insurance whose cost will rise faster than their wages.  This is particular pernicious when it comes to 20 and 30-somethings, fresh out of College, with huge student loans already, and few good job prospects.

This is horrible policy. It is also political suicide.  The people in the progressive blogosphere who are pushing for a “public option” without insisting on an actual robust option (again, none of the options being considered are robust and even if linked to Medicare rates none of them will be because they are not large enough) are pushing for a law which is a massive giveaway to insurance companies—a regressive tax on the middle class.  It is worse than immoral, though it’s terribly immoral, it is a horrible mistake the price for which will be paid at the ballot box.

I have warned on this repeatedly, as have others.  We have not been listened to.  I am not looking forward to having the last laugh on this, because it is a laugh which will be purchased in the suffering of Americans, but I will have the last, bitter, laugh.

Progressives need to learn how to analyze policy.  The reason you elect a particular party, Senator, President or Representative, let alone a Congress, is to implement good policies, not to pass something bad for the sake of saying they passed something.

When you pass good policy (say a stimulus bill which actually improves the job situation, instead of a stimulus bill to weak to do more than slow the bleeding) the population, aka: voters, receive good results. That makes voters happy. When they’re happy, they vote for you again.  When they aren’t happy, they don’t.  This is how LIBERAL government works.  Do good things, reap the benefits.

Reactionary government figures that if you give enough money to private interests and throw a few scraps to the population, you can buy the election.  But it doesn’t work.  Democrats received more money from special interests last election not because special interests decided they loved Democrats, but because the Republican brand was so sullied they knew the Republicans were toast.  So they gave money to the Democrats to protect their interests.  They bought in.

But the second Democrats are weakened, and Republicans look like they can win, they’ll go back to giving Republicans most of their money.

The right thing to do, passing good policy, isn’t just the right thing to do morally, it’s the right thing to do pragmatically.  It is clearly pointless to expect most Democratic legislators to do the right thing for moral reasons, but it would be nice if they understood they are cutting their own throats by continuously passing bad policy.

Went and renewed my Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) card today. Stepped into the OHIP office at 8:30, an office close enough to where I live that I could walk to it . A receptionist looked at my forms and documentation (a phone bill to show my address, my passport to show a signature with a picture, my old health card and a one page form.) She gave me a number, I sat down and was called less than 5 minutes later. The agent looked over my papers, chided me for not renewing it sooner, took a new picture of me, and gave me a letter to use along with my old health card so I can get care till I receive my new card in the mail.

Total elapsed time? Less than 15 minutes.

Now, to be fair, this is a lot better than my experience with OHIP in the early 2000’s when I was upgraded from a non-picture card to a picture card. That experience was a nightmare—long waits, an office almost 45 minutes from where I lived, unclear instructions so that I had to come back a second time, and a hostile and overworked agent. But in general my experiences with the OHIP bureaucracy, including the time I moved provinces twice in less than six months, theoretically making me covered by neither province, have been nothing but positive. In the case where I was covered by no one, a manager quickly made the right decision, on the spot: I had to be covered by someone, I was now living in Ontario, and therefore Ontario would cover me.

Simplicity is next to Godliness when it comes to bureaucracy, and from a patient’s perspective, the Canadian health care system tends to be simplicity itself.