About 'health care info'|Election Info: Health Care
The Senate Budget Committee held a hearing on Tuesday considering various models for health care reform. While protesters made the news and got arrested, some of the details of the hearing itself got lost. I subscribe to the National Partnership for Women and Children's weekly newsletter, which today featured this interesting snippet: Health insurers would be willing to end the practice of charging women higher premiums than men for individual insurance policies if the government agrees not to establish a public insurance plan, America's Health Insurance Plans President Karen Ignagni said Tuesday, the New York Times reports (Pear, New York Times, 5/6). Ignagni made the proposal at a Senate Finance Committee hearing that focused on ways to cover uninsured U.S. residents as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's health care system. President Obama and congressional Democrats support the creation of a government-run insurance program that would compete with private insurance plans.Did you know that women pay more for the same coverage as men? I didn't, and I have been active in seeking health care reform. John Kerry told her that such discrimination was wrong, and would have to stop anyway, and could not be used as a bargaining chip. He introduced legislation forbidding sex discrimination in the cost of health insurance. But the insurance industry seems so desperate to avoid a public competitor, that it is even willing to testify about and stop practices most people are not aware of. Why are they doing this? What is it about the public insurance option that frightens them? Let us look at what the a public option for health insurance actually would do. When looking at government-paid health care by itself, Dennis Kucinich during the presidential campaign called it Medicare for All. Essentially, even as one choice out of many, a government plan would look a lot like Medicare. Put another way, people over 65, and the disabled already have a public option. Medicare allows a free choice of doctors and hospitals; I know, since I have Medicare due to a disability. Its premiums and co-payments are much lower than private plans, and its administrative costs run at about 3-5%, compared to about 18-30% for private plans. Critics of having a kind of public plan available to all say that it would ruin the insurance industry. It might, but insurers might adapt in creative ways that would allow them to compete. It is an interesting thought. It could lead to some real rethinking of how insurers care for their policy holders. AHIP says it would accept more regulation rather than a public plan. I doubt they would accept the kind of regulation that would lead to real systemic change: providing coverage for all applicants, charging the same whether a policy holder has a pre-existing condition or not, and not raising rates when someone gets sick, and being required to pay for a yet-to-be-determined list of medical services. That last is the problem. As for-profit corporations, health insurance companies are required by law to work for the best return for their shareholders. They are not required by law to cover the cost of needed medical services for policy holders. A good piece of those administrative costs goes for finding ways to refuse to pay for care. There is an old joke that HMO stand for Healthy Members Only. A public option would give consumers a genuine choice. Small businesses that cannot afford to cover their employees could buy into it under some versions; in others, insurance coverage would be separate individual coverage.. This would relieve the burden on our businesses that cannot compete with foreign competitors who do not have to pay for their employees' health care. People would not lose insurance when they lost their jobs, and would continue to be covered when they are sick and cannot work. One of the great ironies of our current system is that when a person is too sick to work, so they have less money, they also lose their health coverage. Medicare is far from perfect. It needs modernization so it can pay for more preventive care, and so that it includes dental and vision care. The prescription drug policy under Medicare needs to be scrapped and put under regular Medicare coverage. But all of this is another subject. We spend more money than any other country in the world for healthcare, and yet we have 47 million uninsured and many more under-insured. With a public health insurance plan, much of that can be fixed - just the savings in administrative costs would cover a large number of the uninsured. We need a public option, so Americans can have a real choice when it comes to health insurance. For more information about Women's Health News, e-mail info@nationalpartnership.com. Source: New York Times, May 6, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/us/politics/06insure.html?_r=2 |
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