The tug of war over health care drags on and on in Washington, and some days it’s high comedy. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.
But in truth, a lot about health care is complicated. We’re living longer. Hooray for that, but longevity on a mass scale carries costs: for everything from joint replacement to age-related dementia.
We’ve found ways to cure, lessen, or prevent diseases, and hooray for that, too. But research is expensive. So are experimental drugs and prolonged treatment and delicate surgery and extensive therapy.
We can deliver babies months before full term and, thanks to science, exceptional care, and specialized hospital units, those babies not only survive but thrive. And all of that is expensive.
Who will pay the costs?
Somebody has to. And there, of course, is the problem. But that problem is complicated by a couple of other issues:
One, we don’t agree on whether health care is a right or a privilege. And many political leaders apparently believe it’s a privilege.
Two, we still insist on financing a lot of health care through a combination of patients’ out-of-pocket payments and health insurance.
As a result, Republicans in Congress suggest letting people with no health problems go without insurance – or letting them buy insurance from a different pool than people with health problems. For many Americans, that would raise the cost of insurance well past the point of affordability.
Some presumably bright members of Congress pretend they don’t understand the principle of insurance. How else do we explain Illinois Republican John Shimkus, who questioned why men should have to buy a policy that covers prenatal care?
The solution, as it has been all along, is a single-payer system, based on the principle that if we have a right to live, we have a right to health care that helps us live. And that access to vital health care shouldn’t be affected by how much money we have.
With single-payer, as Cornell Professor Robert Frank explained in a New York Times column on Sunday, a public agency – the government – handles the financing of health care, but care is provided the way it is now, by private professionals, not by physicians and others who work for the government.
In his Times column, Frank (whom we interviewed on the subject in May) focused on the issue of cost. And yes, of course, paying for health care for everyone would be expensive. And yes, of course, the money to pay for it would come from taxes – more taxes than we’re paying now.
But the overall cost of health care, Frank and others insist, is less under single-payer than it is now. “Substantially,” Frank says. The reasons: administrative costs are lower. The expensive health-care advertising we see now is almost eliminated. And most important, says Frank, “large government entities are able to negotiate much more favorable terms with service providers.”
Sunday afternoon, The Hill news site reported that support for single-payer is building among Congressional Democrats, particularly in the House, where Michigan’s John Conyers has 113 co-sponsors for a single-payer bill.
Pipe dream? Sure. At the moment. It’s the most liberal legislators who are behind single-payer. But the public is apparently on board.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 53 percent of Americans support single-payer. That’s “somewhat higher” than the support Kaiser has found previously, the foundation said.
But, the foundation said, the support is “malleable.” Opinions changed with the wording, and with the predictable arguments that critics would launch – “too much government control,” for instance – opposition shot way up.
“Malleable support” is better than no support, though. And it seems pretty clear that most Americans believe health care is a right, not a privilege.
That message is a simple one. And it shouldn’t be hard to sell – even in the age of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan.
This article appears in Jul 12-18, 2017.
It’s not a right when you take away someone else’s right to provide it. When more taxes have to be paid by one person to give someone else a “right”, what happens to that person’s right to his income?
This sort of message has caused a lot of problems for those who listen. As a landlord, I see lots of people with unpaid medical bills on their credit report with the justification that they shouldn’t have to pay those bills. I see lots of people with defaulted student loans also.
Keep telling people that they are “entitled” to stuff that others have to pay for. They are destroying their credit and missing out on the housing they are desiring. More proof that the left isn’t helping, they are hurting the poor.
The basic Principle of Insurance is that it is Underwritten and the costs based upon the determined risk for each applicant.
The ACA did away with that and required healthy people to incur much higher premiums to pay for people with pre-existing conditions or with high risk factors such as smoking and obesity.
If you extend that logic to car insurance people with no accidents or violations would have their rates tripled to allow someone with multiple DWI’s to pay the same rate. Or how about we all pay 18% interest on our loans so that no one is denied?
If the Government wants to subsidize people with high risk then they need to honestly rearrange their budget to pay for it. The ACA was misrepresented to the American people with its negative aspects delayed until after the 2012 reelection
You know what I don’t understand about this whole “healthcare is a right” debate? I need food daily to live, but I don’t hear people advocating free food…. What’s up with that? Like health care, there’s steak ready available, so why can’t I eat steak and eggs for breakfast, a steak sandwich for lunch, and a nice steak dinner to cap the day? It should just be free, like healthcare. After all, food is clearly more important to our survival than health care.
One thing is for certain. Ms Towler had demonstrated that she does not understand the concept of insurance at all. Insurance is intended to have the members of a similar risk class cover the unexpected and potentially very expensive costs of a negative event happening. Note that the costs are borne by the members of a similar risk class.
Which Obamacare, the young, a low medical risk class, are expected to carry the costs and subsidize the costs for high risk person, who are older (such as me). Since younger people in general have lower both lower income and lower medical expenses, how can this be considered fair? Ask yourself, do older, low risk drivers pay the same auto insurance premiums as teens and people in their 20s, who are a higher risk group. Not at all. Insurance rates for the young are much higher. Or how about life insurance? Term policies are sold to every age group, but are the rates for say a 10 year policy the same for someone that is 25 as one that is 60, or do men, who die at younger ages than women, pay the same as women? Again, not at all.
In the future, please make sure you have a basic understanding of topics you plan to write about.
The truth is, you don’t have a “right to healthcare”, any more than you have an inherent right to anything.
Rights are reciprocal agreements between you and other invested parties – in this case fellow citizens. All rights begin and end with a demand from the People. If enough people demand single payer, then single payer it shall be. No arguments based on common sense or appeals to decency or empathy are going to achieve this without a demand.
The Constitution allows for this. If ringing the planet with military bases and spending over half of all discretionary funds and over 50% of debt service on war, falls within the scope of “provide for the common defense”, surely single payer falls within the scope of “promote the general welfare”. It will be expensive. Currently politicians want to slash Medicare/Medicaid/SS because the only way to keep these programs solvent is to reduce military spending, so you have direct competition between these programs but is never couched as such.
The cost of the system prior to the ACA was too high and double digit premium increases were common. The cost after ACA “reforms” is still too high and double digit increases still common. The cost of health insurance for a family is higher than the average mortgage and growing yearly. Inflation in this one sector is a major reason for stagnating wages and declines in disposable income. Single payer may be expensive but the alternatives are barely worth discussing – they all wind up costing even more to achieve far less.
The US has too few residency slots, too many barriers to foreign trained doctors practicing here, too many restrictions on traveling abroad for medical care and still being covered by insurance, too many restrictions on importation of medications. There may be good reasons for these conditions, but the end result is the same – a captive market and one that will not respond to free market dynamics. There is no free market solution.
We supposedly live by the law of the land, the Constitution. Rights are enumerated as relating to freedom of expression, worship, and peaceful assembly — which abridge no one else’s rights — not goods and services for which others are forced to pay.
You have a right to have ACCESS to healthcare.
You do NOT have the right to other peoples money to pay for healthcare INSURANCE.
I wonder what the next “right” to a private sector product or service will be portrayed by the progressive liberals? A car, a garden hose, maybe even a beach chair?
I think healthcare falls under “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Inalienable rights…
The solution is, as with 99% of the things MaryAnna moans about weekly, is jobs. If more people had jobs they could pay for their own health insurance (and food, and shelter, and, and, and).
Currently there are thousands of jobs available locally. It’s not that they don’t exist, it’s the lack of qualified applicants.
It’s hard to understand how people will ever escape the “cradle to grave” when the government (taxpayers) continually accepts more and more responsibility for their every want and need.
Yes Johnny, if more people could afford to pay for their own health insurance, then the situation would be better. But even then, what do we do about the others who cannot afford health care?
Should a diagnosis of a curable disease that is fatal if untreated be an automatic death sentence for the poor? Is that the civilization that you envision for our fine nation?
People don’t mind paying fire insurance on their homes. They understand the value of pooled risk, see the benefit of the ongoing expense as a hedge against personal disaster, and know that all in the risk pool contribute. Too poor to pay fire insurance? Then don’t own a home. Easy.
Unfortunately, we can’t take the same attitude toward health care. There is no ethical way to tell someone to do without any of it when in dire circumstances.
Mark, I have no problem taking care of the truly needy. It would be cruel not to. Keep in mind that the people on the right side are much more charitable than the left.
Why would I keep in mind something that is false? https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.…
Actually Mark the study you linked to confirms that Republicans and Conservatives have many more charitable donations at all income levels.
The author then somewhat arbitrarily decided that religious based charities should not be counted(Don’t tell the IRS) and that homeless shelters, food cupboards, furniture donations,addiction service etc. are not really charitable unless they are secular.
He then excluded all charitable donations from regular church attendees from his sample to control for “religious charities ”
That is how he came up with his conclusion.
By most commonly accepted definitions (and IRS rules) Republicans and Conservatives donate far more to Charity.
Conservatives tend to be wealthier than liberals, so of course based on that factor they’d give more. This study controlled for that variable.
Conservatives have greater levels of church/temple/mosque etc attendance than liberals. Religious adherents are often obligated to give a percentage of their income to their own church, and this study controlled for that variable as well.
What the study showed was that if you took two people of comparable income level and comparable religious fervor, their level of charitable contributions would be independent of their political views.
So the headline isn’t that conservatives give more. Rather, it is that the rich give more (having more to give), and churchgoers give more (to their own churches).
Page 7 Mark. Conservative’s give more even when controlled for income.
You also cannot separate charitable giving based upon whether religious or secular . This is not supported by either tax law or the definitions of Charity. And no Mark churches may suggest a certain amount of giving but do not require it. This is left to the individual to decide.
With regards to healthcare, we need to abandon a Democrat vs. Republican discussion of the issue. It would be a good first step to shift the terminology more towards the center. For example, how about “self-insurance” instead of “single-payer”? Or, stop the “repeal-and-replace” talk and start emphasizing “amending” or “fixing”.
I’d bet that it’s a Democrat asking the question whether healthcare is a right or a privilege. So, let’s repeal that question, and replace it. Or better yet, we should amend it. The “privilege” is not needed. Is health-care a right? Start with that.