Health Care Wanted: Dead or Alive by Dennis Kucinich
Posted on August 18, 2009
by Dennis Kucinich
The masquerade is over! The “public option” is … dead.
Health care reform is now a private option: WHICH FOR PROFIT INSURANCE COMPANY DO YOU WANT? You have to choose. And you have to pay. If you have a low income, under HR3200 government will subsidize the private insurance companies and you will still have to pay premiums, co-pays and deductibles.
The Administration plan requires that everyone must have health insurance, so it is delivering tens of millions of new “customers” to the insurance companies. Health care? Not really. Insurance care! Absolutely. Cost controls? No chance.
You will next hear talk about “co-ops.” The truth is that insurance company campaign contributions have co-opted the public interest.
The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called “health care reform” bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring.
Removing the “public option” from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a “private option” paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no health care.
Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process will insure only the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost.
As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations.
Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits – they call this cost control!
If the matter were not so serious, it would be farcical: The executive branch pretends that the proposed health care reforms are something they are not. The legislation is being attacked for something it is not. Congressional leadership and the White House defend the legislation, pretending it actually is the very proposal that is being attacked. But it is not.
A commonsense government health care reform policy would insure that every single American has full access to health care by expanding Medicare to cover everyone under a Single Payer System. We are already paying for a universal standard of care, it is just we are not getting it.
Dennis Kucinich
