Is Our Country Getting Better Or Worse?

The religious right has turned itself into a political action tool. When they did that they changed the very nature of our country. Republicans have aligned themselves to that movement because it represents a large block of votes. And that is what most politicians concern themselves with when they are campaigning—blocks of votes. Mind you that is mostly their only reason for this concern. Career politicians spout a lot of rhetoric, but their biggest concern is getting elected…and re-elected…and re-elected. Before the religious right turned themselves into a political movement, neither political party worried about the issues the religious right focuses on.

Once elections are over, however, politicians from both parties go back to behaving the same as they always have. A few years ago the Republicans got together and created a contract with America, in which they promised to promote certain ideas and issues that further basic conservative values. Once they were elected, they conveniently forgot about the entire thing and went about their normal pro corporate activities. It turned out to simply be a ploy to get elected; and it worked, capturing the election for them and giving them control of both houses of congress during a Democrat presidency. They achieved their objective.

What we have now is a Democrat party in control that, although they consistently vote in favor of basic human rights, they either know nothing about economics or they simply don’t care. When Democrats come up with programs to help people, as noble or honorable as those programs may be, they immediately go after more tax money to pay for it instead of trying to shave the money out of programs that are otherwise a waste of taxpayer money. It seems that money to them is nothing to concern themselves with at all. They can always simply get more from the taxpayers. Their programs are not perfect either. They are usually over complicated, and they almost always cause many unintended consequences.

Somehow the Democrats have arrived at the opinion that if you throw money or workers at the bottom of the economy that the economy will grow. Anyone who knows economics knows that the economy is not a plant. It will not grow from the ground up. Without steady income, people will not spend enough money to cause economic growth. This requires jobs. Providing welfare and food stamps will help those on the bottom of the pay scale but it will not create economic growth. Those two are separate things. Giving money to the unfortunate for bread and salt will not cause enough economic activity to warrant, say, Walmart to start hiring more people.

We have a number of programs and grants that are absolute failures and total wastes of money. They could cancel or revoke these programs to get the money for their other precious programs, but they don’t. To compound this debt crisis, we give aid to countries who openly hate us. Where is the logic in that? There are sizeable sums that could be recovered by revoking this aid. But nobody in Washington is looking at this waste. Instead, we have a government actively shaving benefits from our veterans as though we owe them nothing, while at the same time creating a pension plan for themselves that pays them full salary for the rest of their life. And this money is a small sum when compared to what we send out to other countries, only to have those countries use it to fund efforts against us.

We also openly fund stupid things like studies on bovine flatulation. Seriously, cow farts? We are funding studies on this? That is correct. Regardless of any scientific value that study may have, it is doubtful that it is more important than managing our debt crisis. We have a lot of funding out there for scientific studies that are not necessary at the moment. There is a lot of waste in Washington that could be cut to help fund their seemingly important projects.

When the Democrats took the White House, one of the things they did was to create grants for large sums of money and earmarked it for ecology oriented, or green companies. It is for improving our environment, they stated. Millions of dollars went to companies that didn’t even last a full year before they went completely out of business.

I must say as a small business owner that when you start a business you are going to face ups and downs when you first launch your enterprise. If you are funded with millions of dollars in the form of grants which you are not obligated to pay back and you do not even make it for a full year before going belly up, then it appears to those of us who know about starting and running a business that you never intended to do anything with the money except steal it.

Many of the owners of these start-up companies were political donors to the Democrat party during their last election campaigns. Perhaps they had good intentions, but if they cannot even stay solvent with grants that large they are either stupid or unethical. To some of us it simply appears that they gave large sums of money to a political party to help them get elected, then received their money back from the government’s general fund as a thank you for their help in winning the election.

Even if we are wrong in this view, there is no way this can be looked at which does not make the Democrat party look corrupt, here. It also had to be obvious to members of congress, but the Democrats funded them anyway. And to be fair, this is only one example. And although this example illustrates problems with the Democrats, they are not alone in wrongdoing, or in corruption. Our congress is infested with career-minded leaches that don’t bother themselves with looking after the best interests of the country. And this is prevalent in both parties.

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Republicans have changed their focus, too. Although they understand and respect the principals of economics, they blindly support capitalism’s most basic structure and flatly deny that it is imperfect. Minimum wage has been controlled by our government during my entire working life, which is over 40 years. The economy still went through its normal cycles, year in and year out in spite of the controlled minimum wage. The sky did not fall. Anne Coulter was recently quoted in opposition to the increase of minimum wage. She stated that the iron law of supply and demand would raise the minimum wage if only we would leave it alone. This is gobbledygook. Conservatives also state that raising minimum wage will cost jobs.

The current minimum wage we had was established by the government in the first place. Yes, it is true that the laws of supply and demand will cause our capitalist economy to reach what we know as equilibrium. However, that equilibrium will not ever be livable for those at the bottom of the wage scale. Our economy will not and cannot ever reach equilibrium anyway because the government controls our imports and exports. Left unchecked, the unregulated economy would produce worse conditions for those at the bottom and better conditions for those at the top.

The minimum wage issue is a wasted debate. Establishing a mandatory minimum wage has been done by our government all along during my 64 year life, and it has not produced the harmful effects that conservatives are preaching. It has not even come close. Republicans consistently vote against anything that restricts how corporations can operate. And although they understand economics better than the Democrats, they have the opinion that leaving everything alone will produce utopian prosperity and a vibrant and healthy economy for all.

Even Adam Smith, in his book “The Wealth of Nations,” wrote that if the economy is left unchecked there will be rampant and uncontrolled greed among the owners of the means of production. And there will always be captains of industry who take advantage of the system to maximize their own gain above and beyond their already enormous profits.

Further, losing jobs to technology (another fear announced by the Republicans) was already happening and will continue to happen anyway. Business owners who can realize savings by using technology will do so. Walmart has self-checkout cashier stations, where a single cashier manages stations of four and more checkout registers, in most of their stores already. And that trend is spreading. Theatres are automating their concession areas to minimize manpower needs, and they are even raising prices as they do this, probably to pay for the remodeling they had to do to accomplish this.

Every business owner knows that making more profit in their business comes down to saving costs as much as it does to raising prices. Labor is a big expense in any business. Sometimes raising prices is either not practical because it will hurt sales, or not available because sales is not part of their business model. Managing costs is part of efficiency, and it is efficiency that makes a business solvent. Ask any small business owner. Changing the mandatory minimum wage may make it advantageous to automate sooner, but it will happen anyway.

What Republicans won’t acknowledge is that left unchecked, large corporations will exhibit no morals whatsoever. Big Pharma has used lobbyists to get laws passed stating that only a drug can be a cure for any disease. This is blatantly stupid. There are a number of cures for diseases out there that are not drugs. Sound wave frequency, proper food in your diet, changing your lifestyle, cannabis oil, varying your exercise regimen have all been known to eliminate certain diseases from the human body. That law is simply there to insure that big pharma still can make their millions with their extremely expensive and often harmful drugs. They do not care about the moral side of this; only the profits.

The food industry is currently using lobbyists of their own to attempt to make it illegal for people to have a vegetable garden. How ridiculous is that? This, too, is only about their profits. Where is the moral logic to this? There are 15 ingredients in the typical bottle of coffee creamer. Why do you think that is? If you say health, you would be wrong. Still, Republicans steadfastly work very hard to protect the rights of large corporations over the rights of the citizen. Between that and their efforts to pander to the religious right, where is their moral ground? It appears that in spite of their rhetoric, much of their work only panders to the desires of large corporations.

But in order to get the actual vote of the people they design their rhetoric to appeal to people who want to follow literal application of the bible that makes no sense at all. Republican candidates are making some of the stupidest statements possible during their campaigns. Statements like, ”allowing gay marriage will lead to sibling marriage,” can only appeal to people who already believe this stupid stuff (this is not a slam on the hillbilly states at all). Pushing for strict adherence to the written word of the bible and to make it the law of the land is merely an effort to appease the voting block they aligned themselves with for votes.

They got the political contributions which helped them get elected and they must pay it back by promoting their agenda, as non-caring and illogical as that agenda is. Contradictions can be found throughout the bible. One cannot select any passage that suits their myopic view of what life should be and then incorporate it into law without causing strife in the country. If you are using the bible to hurt other people, you are using it wrong. There are no exceptions to this.

I believe that Republicans are on the way out anyway. The Tea Party may be surfacing as the dominant party for conservatives. They want to eliminate the import export bank and do away with corporate subsidies. These are good goals. Still, they are also whoring themselves to the religious right. They say they are also for the right to life. Sounds good to them, but it is not accurate. If they were actually for the right to life they would allow their tax money to help the orphan children in our country, to help the unfortunate, or even to fund adoptions as a reasonable alternative to abortion but they don’t want their tax money spent that way. That makes them pro-birth, not pro-life.

None of this activity is acting in the best interest of the United States. How is our continuous bum rush to send military and financial aid to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait, The Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia in the best interest of our own country? Yet when we need to take care of our retiring veterans we will not find the money to do so? We give out corporate subsidies to companies that are profitable. We write bills in congress to provide tax incentives to companies who are moving jobs to foreign countries. Where do we benefit as a nation from any of this? When a small business owner mismanages his or her company they are allowed to fail, but when a huge corporation is mismanaged, it is bailed out. This is rewarding incompetence. How is any of this in the best interest of The United States?

Congress’ job is to take care of the country, not its corporations. Left to their own devices, corporations will take care of their selves—or not. In the automobile industry alone, American Motors, Packard, Desoto and Studebaker were at one time all viable corporations. They were allowed to fail. Why do taxpayers have to bail out large companies that are failing because of their own bad management?

A bank makes loans that are way too risky; a manufacturer doesn’t compete well against foreign companies in the same market; an auto maker loses market share because they make a less reliable product than their foreign competitors. These are all the results of bad decisions by management. Should the legislature make taxpayers bail them out? Is that taking care of the country?

Anyone who researches the written works of our forefathers will find throughout those written documents, abundant references to the absolute necessity of the separation of Church and State. And all of these references express fears of just exactly what is happening in our government today. Our congress is more polarized now than it has been since the civil war. It is also the least productive congress we have ever had.

When your conservative politicians are quoted in the media as being unwilling to compromise at all on any of their issues they are basically stating that they are unwilling to govern. For it is in the very compromise that they are against where we will find in ourselves the ability to move forward and make progress for our citizens. But they took money from the religious right; and now they owe them.

Instead of steering us into the future, we find ourselves in a constant fight to undo decisions of the past. Roe vs Wade was a decision made by a conservative-controlled Supreme Court. Yet our people remain focused on undoing this mandate, presumably based on religious reasons. Nominees for the Supreme Court are no longer questioned at length to determine if they will hear each case presented before them and honestly judge these cases on the merits of the presentation. The right always asks, point blank, if they will overturn Roe vs Wade. They are not interested if the candidate is willing to hear cases as they come. This is clearly a blatant effort to stack the deck. This fight alone has our congress, and the country, so polarized that we are hardly recognizable as The United States anymore. And there are more fights in today’s political environment that have our citizens acting like fools.

The ongoing gun control debate is another example of how we are over reacting so much that we look foolish. One side wants to get rid of gun ownership. They don’t care how, really, and their logic is based on the rise of mass killings in our society. But that is just their excuse. They have made no effort to create laws making a mandatory life sentence (or death if you prefer) for anyone who commits one of these mass killings. It doesn’t matter that the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the constitution. They don’t care. They are pushing for tighter regulations, but that is just the foot-in-the-door excuse which serves to advance them toward their ultimate goal of removing every gun from every home.

As a result, gun owners are going public, carrying guns into stores just to display and flaunt their gun rights and gain attention for their cause. The entire debate has taken on a most gruesome, bizarre and irresponsible display of bad taste and flawed logic on both sides. On the one hand, eliminating private gun ownership cannot be achieved in this country because there will never be complete compliance. The best case scenario will result in a huge black market for guns that will no longer produce tax revenue on sales. On the other hand, groups of people walking into Home Depot, Target or Chili’s with semi-automatic rifles hanging from their necks on lanyards is far from responsible gun ownership. This is becoming such a big deal. We are losing our common sense as a country.

If Republicans and Democrats were to get together and stop sending aid to countries that hate us, perhaps we would be able to use the money saved that we now squander on useless endeavors, to help make America a better place to live. Perhaps if we used our military to protect our own country and make us more secure, instead of to protect our large corporations’ business interest or to meddle in the affairs of other countries who don’t like us anyway, maybe we would have the money to accomplish more things for Americans.

Believe me; we have plenty of problems of our own to work on without going around the world to find problems to solve. We are so hung up with getting involved in conflicts around the world that we somehow don’t find it easy to let other countries settle their own problems. Who, I wonder, actually wants us to get involved in their private civil war? They just want our money. And they are unwilling to even give us any respect for it. Besides, spreading democracy by placing a puppet government in a foreign country, then expecting that democracy to take the same shape as the one in this country is unintelligent.

Any democracy will take the shape of the character of the people who embrace it. And for it to even take hold anywhere it must truly be embraced by the people there. We are so caught up in dropping little democracy bombs around the world that we are losing sight of our own problems. We care less about democracy in other countries than we do about our business interests over there anyway, or we would not behave the way we do. Our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in the military deserve to not have their lives placed on the line for things unconcerned with our own liberties.

Right now our own little problems are growing as fast as any other problems in the rest of the world. I am not advocating isolationism. Nor am I in favor of shrinking our military in the blind hope that what is happening in the rest of the world will never present itself as a problem here. Only an idiot would believe that. But our military is supposed to be used to protect our own country and our own way of life. It was never intended for us to use our military to police the world.

There is nothing wrong with letting the rest of the world develop its own character without our interference. Besides, we are spending ourselves into unrecoverable debt on this stuff. And we are getting nothing in return for this except declining respect and in many cases, outright hatred. We really need to get control of our national debt. Don’t you think? And what is happening to our national respect? We no longer respect ourselves like we used to. We certainly are not respected by the rest of the world like we used to be.

Focusing more on our own problems would be much more possible if we are not also spending our money to change the rest of the world and remake it in our own image. It’s not about us anyway. It is about the money. Corporations will never focus on what is good for the country over what is good for their company. Why do we let the government focus on what is good for the companies over what is good for the country? We can have a free market economy without draining the general fund to support corporations. We can have individual opportunity without sacrificing our rights for the benefit of the machine. It is time for level heads to prevail again, don’t you think?

 

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Getting Rid of Health Insurance Would Improve Healthcare Quality

While The five largest health Insurance companies’ profits rose by $12.2 billion last year, which represents an increase of 56% over 2008, Americans are paying more money for less coverage.  Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius says that the cost of premiums is skyrocketing and profits are soaring.  This doesn’t look good to the average American.  In fact, it almost looks like piracy.  Insurance companies don’t actually provide health care (with the possible exception of Kaiser Permanente).  They simply act as a middle man, a broker if you will, often standing directly in the way of our medical coverage under the guise of managing costs.

What they manage is their bottom line, their own cost outlay–their profit margin.  Actually they have no choice but to do this.  As corporations they and their boards of directors answer to shareholders and are responsible for delivering profits, not health care.  They don’t manage health care at all.  They simply manage what they are willing to pay in order for us to get our health care while still enabling them to have their profits.  And as corporations that must deliver these profits, they have an undeniable conflict of interest.

     

So let’s look at the $12.2 billion identified as profit in 2009, which incidentally is a $4.4 billion increase over the previous year.  And this is only the five largest insurers.  One would think that this is the figure that these companies took in above and beyond the actual cost of our health care (or the health care they have actually approved and paid for).  It does not.  It only represents part of the above and beyond cost.  In fact, according to Conservative Patriot HQ, a conservative blog, ”the top five health insurance companies reported a profit margin of 5.2% for 2009.  This is but a fraction of the cost of letting insurance companies occupy the broker position for providing health care

This $12.2 billion does not include the cost of all of their employee’s salaries and benefits, which come out of the revenue figure before this profit is even figured out.  It also does not include the cost of their multi-story brick buildings in all of the cities where they have buildings.  Nor does it include the cost of heating and cooling these massive office enclaves that are often even larger than the very hospitals and medical clinics they have set themselves up to send us to when we need our valuable health care.  There is the cost of their computer systems, executive travel and company automobiles and a vast array of costs that the average American cannot even think of that compile normal operating costs.  And let’s not forget the cost of lobbying against the current push toward health care reform, which in itself is in the billions of dollars. All of these costs are subtracted from revenue to determine their profits.

These costs are simply the cost of operating a business.  But they are not the cost of our actual healthcare.  They are, however, compiled on top of the actual cost of our overall healthcare.  And they are reflected as part of our healthcare costs.  These companies stand firmly between us and our healthcare delivery system.  This portion of our healthcare cost comes to a lot more than a mere $12.2 billion.  It is a lot more than twice this amount.  A typical family health care plan today costs the average American wage earner three times per pay period what they  paid per month five years ago.

There are a lot of services we need or use in everyday life that are provided much more efficiently through open competition in the private sector of our economy.  But there are many services we need that cannot by the wildest stretch of the imagination be properly provided by complete private enterprise involvement.  Police and fire protection would fall into this category.  Can you imagine what kind of justice you would receive if you had to pay private policing agencies to solve your burglaries and/or homicides?  How would you like to have to negotiate a deal in order to have the murder of your son or the burglary of your family business investigated?

How easy do you think it would be to get your house fire extinguished if you had to get your fire protection from insurance companies when your house caught on fire.  Would decisions ultimately be made by insurance companies as to whether or not it would be worth it for them to send fire trucks to put out your burning house?  Would it happen any faster if it were an older home?  How many rooms are on fire?  Are you covered for a fully involved, smoke and fire showing, blazing inferno?  Would you have to talk to the insurance switchboard before the fire protection company decided to even dispatch the trucks?  If the insurance company denied payment for whatever reason, would the fire trucks simply not come.  Do you get my point?

Yet this is the dilemma we are faced with when it comes to our health care.  Health insurance companies have set themselves up with contracts to see that we get health care...up to a point.  So, does this actually make sense?  Of course not.  This isn’t the only thing wrong with our health care system, but it certainly qualifies as one of the most expensive.

Congress doesn’t get it.  All of the news coverage on this ongoing healthcare debate shows that congress is simply trying to find a way to have everyone covered.  Covered?  Don’t they mean insured?  By sticking with the health insurance method of providing healthcare we don’t stand a ghost of a chance to minimize the cost of our overall healthcare.  Killing the public option is the biggest coup the health insurance lobby could possibly pull off.  And congress is still thinking inside the box.  How can our healthcare problems be solved by simply changing the way we are insured?

Their (the insurance lobby’s) television ads are filled with rhetoric that amounts to nothing more than a list of talking points aimed at keeping health insurance companies intrenched in a broker position in our healthcare system.  All that would accomplish would be to filter our healthcare dollars through an extra set of hands that can pull out a profit after having done nothing to further any advancements in medical science or to increase the quality of our healthcare what so ever.  In fact, in view of their track record it can be argued that through the practice of denial of coverage they have significantly diminished the quality of our healthcare system while maintaining healthy profits for themselves.

Before you think of rebutting this, let me ask if you are healthy.  Because that is the only group of people out there who think our system is the finest in the world.  No one who has had serious health care problems  ever argues this point for the simple reason that they are the ones who have experienced denied coverage.  Healthy people don’t get denied.  They are not the ones who cost the insurance companies any serious money.

Not one country on the world stage that has a free enterprise health care delivery system ranks among the top 25 nations for the quality of their citizens’ healthcare.  At last measuring, the United States ranked an embarrassing 40.  That placed us behind Cuba and the Dominican Republic.  Is leaving Health Insurance companies in the middle of our healthcare delivery chain worth it?  Hardly.

What Can We Learn from the Ft. Hood Massacre?

During Word War II we interned many Japanese and German Americans into camps to prevent the effectiveness of however many spies and espionage agents that those two countries may have had in our country at the time.  These days, however, we are not doing anything like that.  Not that we should be interning Arab Americans in camps while we are involved in this war against radical Islam, but the Ft. Hood incident should at least serve as a warning sign that we are too lax when it comes to acting on warning signs we se in individuals within our Arab American community.

It is widely held that we should welcome diversity and not stoop to such a level anymore.  Our society now insists upon political correctness to a fault.   We are a nation of people who are walking on eggshells when it comes to how we talk or write about people and things these days.  A pox upon us if we offend anyone.  We are also way too cautious in how we deal with bonafide threats to our national security.

How many more incidents like the one at Ft. Hood must the American public endure before we get serious about our defense.  When citizens take the oath upon enlisting in the military, they swear to protect the country and the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.  (I did notice, however, that this particular phrase was missing from the Presidential oath of office during the last inauguration.)

We are dealing with a very different enemy now than we were dealing with during World War II.  Our current enemy strives to maximize civilian casualties and uses our diverse societal structure against us.  Laugh at Homeland Security if you wish, but it must be taken seriously.  Take the massacre at Ft. Hood, for example.  The gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, is not only a devout Muslim, he had displayed behavior that raised red flags with his superiors and government officials, yet they failed to act upon this information.

News reports revealed that Hasan had belonged to a radical mosque in Falls Church, VA.  According to the  Telegraph.co.UK website, the Dar al-Hijrah mosque had also been attended by two of the September 11 highjackers.  Also, the FBI knew that Hasan had been in contact with the radical former leader of the mosque, Anwar al-Awlak, whom the Telegraph website identified as an American born Yemeni imam.

In this day and age the American population has Muslims everywhere.  Some are in plain sight and openly supportive of Islam and the jihad and others are posing as Mediterranean types or even South Americans.  Those just mentioned would be worthy of our hard scrutiny.  While it is true that there are many innocents among the American Muslim population, we cannot afford to be less than vigilant just to be politically correct.  That Hasan was not only a Psychiatrist but an American army officer in a position of high trust only proves  that we must not let our guard down for any reason.  However, it does seem quite stupid on our part that we didn’t even bother to profile this killer.  All of the signs were there, and they were blatant.

Here again, we are in the political position nationally where we are making serious mistakes with our national security in favor of political correctness.  With the profiling tools currently at our disposal we have no one to blame but our own incompetence for overlooking simple facts such as the ones found in the Hasan case.  And given what we know about how Islam is preached and what its goal is, we would be foolish not to realize there are people who are serious threats all over the country who are worthy of being placed under the microscope.  More to the point, once we have suspects under watch we should know that watching someone to see if they will lead us to al-Qaeda or the Taliban has risks and that those risks need to be tightly managed.  At this point it doesn’t matter whether Hasan acted alone or on orders.  Thirteen dead and 42 wounded is still 13 dead and 42 wounded.

But rather than play the blame game we should focus on preventing incidents like this one from happening again.  We really need to wise up to the fact that our penchant for political correctness and the cries against profiling are creating huge gaping weaknesses in our ability to protect our country from enemies like who we are now at war with.  And realizing that war is no game and that we cannot play at it as though it were, we should also consider that there may be very real benefits to changing our rules of engagement for our war against radical Islam.

We should focus on winning and not be as concerned as we are with how we intend to accomplish the victory we need.  Sun Tzu once said that the general who is more concerned about his own integrity will lose.  America should wake up and realize that we have not won this war.  We should also be mindful that pulling out of the Middle East will not necessarily end it.  Our troops may be over there–but the enemy is definitely over here.  And any refusal to admit this to ourselves is simply naive at best, and dangerous if not fatal at worst.

Major Hasan may have succumbed to the pressure and cracked under stress, but that is unlikely.  As a Psychiatrist he should have been above the inability to manage stress to the degree that would result in a shooting spree.  He had been in contact with a radical, anti-American Imam.  He attended the same mosque as some of the 9-11 highjackers. He was shouting “Allahu Akbar” while remaining calm during a shooting spree that left 13 dead and up to 42 injured.  And according to the Telegraph, he stated at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., “during an hour-long talk he gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors,” that “infidels should have their throat cut.”

According to the same Telegraph article, published on November 5, “One of Hasan's neighbors described how on the day of the massacre, about 9am, he gave her a Koran and told her: ‘I'm going to do good work for God’ before leaving for the base.”

According to one civilian police officer who was interviewed, Hasan was “hiding behind a telephone pole and shooting fellow soldiers in the back as they were trying to get away.  Many writers in the Media have taken the wrong tack by labeling this a hate crime.  What this really was, was an act of war.  This attack was clearly carried out with intent.  This was no mistake on Hasan’s part, and there was clearly premeditation here.  With these pieces of information at hand, it certainly does not look like someone who was simply overcome by stress.

The Ft Hood Massacre was preventable.  It was also as much the result of our political correctness as it was Milik Hasan’s radical inclinations.

Is The House Bill A Real Answer For Healthcare?

Although the House has finally come up with a bill for national healthcare it falls short of accomplishing Democrat’s original goal of total healthcare. When the news broke out today it was touted as an $894 billion piece of legislation, but the congressional budget office believes the bill will spend more like $1.05 trillion over the next decade. Republicans fear that the bill will cause a virtual quagmire by creating new bureaucracies that won’t actually fix anything, which would initiate huge administrative costs to eliminate the huge administrative costs that consumers and employers are now paying to merely support the insurance companies.

According to Health Reform Watch, a web log of the Seton Hall University school of law the combined 2009 salaries of the ten top paid Health Insurance CEO’s amounts to more than $4 billion. CNN reported that the health insurance industry posted over $27 billion in profits for 2008. All of that money was coming from employers and consumers and amounts to over $31 billion in costs above and beyond the actual cost of healthcare. Given that this healthcare, paid for in the first place by consumers is being denied to many because of pre-existing conditions and that ABC news reported this week that women are typically charged up to 70% more for a basic healthcare coverage policy than males of the same age—these profits seem unjustified. They are also not accurate.

When the open enrollment period occurred on my day job last November, I faced a steep increase for my own coverage which put my deduction to $75.00 per pay period for single coverage. The cost to ad my wife to the coverage boosted my plan cost to $220.00 per pay period. That is a 190% increase from my portion of the cost of the policy, which is then added to the total, rendering the cost of the whole package 290% higher that it would have been with single coverage. That is hardly 70% more than the cost of insuring a male. This increase did not involve questions concerning her state of health or age. It was a simple grid. But that is enough of this type of explanation. We already know the system is broken.

The bill the Democrats have come up with is different than we are being told it is. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the $1.05 Trillion bill would eliminate $104 billion of the public deficit in the next decade, but privately it has expressed reservations that this will actually happen. And although Republicans fear that most of the savings will be the result of stopping the growth of Medicare it is a false fear.

As for the Democrats, they don’t view this legislation as the solution. They view this as the first step. According to the Wall Street Journal, “House Democrats said the bill was a historic step toward universal health insurance.” As huge as this bill is, it only increases overall coverage by 13% of the population. They estimate that 96% of the population will be covered, which is up from 83%. And although the bill stops some flagrant abuses—pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied and consumer out of pocket expenses are capped—it is still massive in scope and falls short of the Democrats’ ultimate goal of universal coverage. So even with this bill, you can look forward to more of this to come until that goal is achieved. The good news is that if and when that goal is realized Medicare will no longer be necessary. With true universal coverage everyone will receive healthcare anyway, so Medicare would be redundant.

The health insurance industry does not support this bill because the public option is in it and they believe the public option will put them out of business. Truthfully, with CEO salaries of the top ten companies at a combined cost of over $4 billion annually and with industry profits for these incorporated middlemen at over $27 billion annually—what good are they to the American public when not one dollar of their profits contributes to our national health? In fact, a huge part of the money that does not wind up as profit goes to exorbitant administration costs, much of which supports a concerted effort to deny coverage for many reasons that don’t amount to pre-existing conditions. This money, which by itself is a very significant figure, also doesn’t contribute to our national health. But it does a great deal to insure that the profit line and CEO salaries are as big as they are.

Yes, we have an insurance commission to watch over these companies to insure (poor choice of words, I know) that abuse in this arena is kept to a minimum. But when you are over 40 years old and your annual physical requires a colonoscopy and they find a polyp, just one, your insurance company pays for the colonoscopy as a regularly required procedure. When at 45 you need a second colonoscopy, during which another polyp is found, if your insurance company denies you this coverage because of pre-existing conditions even though you have had continuous coverage—will you feel like the insurance commission is doing its job when you receive a bill for $850 because they refused to pay for the procedure which is a standard part of your annual physical? And how will you feel about the fact that the insurance company didn’t make the decision until three weeks after you had this required procedure?

Clearly, the public can afford not to care at all that the health insurance companies don’t like this bill in its current form. I would be more concerned if they were happy with it. Not giving the insurance companies another dime would go a long way toward covering the cost of this endeavor. Still, fixing our ailing healthcare system is a very large undertaking and it will be a long time before it is over. And sadly, due to the nature of compromise it will probably not get fixed in a way that will truly result in universal healthcare.

Although most things in America are truly best left to the private sector, healthcare is not one of them. With globalization, declining salaries and rising unemployment still changing the face of the American economy we would be much better off if we were not saddled with the cost of our healthcare in the same way we are now. Healthcare should be on the same list as our police and fire protection, road maintenance and other infrastructure items.

Let’s Tell It Like It Is, For A Change!

The evolution of the health care debate has taken us on a wild ride. At first the goal was to have national health care, which sparked fear into conservatives based on the argument that innovation will be stifled by lack of competition. This led to a compromise between Democrats and Republicans which produced the public option. This way, the insurance companies were not directly cut out of the picture with the first stroke of the pen.

At that point Republicans set out to fight the public option. It is all part of their strategy to protect the insurance companies’ involvement in health care. Their argument being that introducing a government run public option into the insurance picture will make it impossible for insurance companies to compete. This is probably correct. In order for insurance companies to be able to compete with a government run, non-profit they would have to turn themselves into non-profit entities.

Given that among the most serious problems with our current health care system are the outrageous cost of health care and the rampant out of control rate of cost escalation—and further given that the health insurance companies’ billions of dollars in annual profits is a major reason for our high cost of health care—It makes perfect sense that this is the point. Because health insurance companies make their profits by denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions (among other reasons) along with restricting the list of reasons why patients need certain procedures and treatments and because by the very nature of corporations they thrive to cut as many costs as possible and increase as much profits as possible in order to show a favorable financial position to their stock holders and boards of directors—insurance companies have become the cancer that infects our health care industry, thereby threatening it with insolvency.

There is a paradox here. To be an efficient corporation health insurance companies must cut people out. They must deny coverage to some in order to insure their profits. This produces more than one problem. One problem is that we will never achieve universal coverage with insurance companies making our health care decisions. Another problem is that with denial of coverage, the number of people allowed to have expensive tests like an MRI or CAT scan is restricted and because of this fact the cost of these procedures has to increase for the hospitals to be able to continue to offer these services. Without universal coverage, health care is inefficient. With out of control rates of rising costs, health care is inefficient. So we come back to the paradox. There can either be efficient health insurance companies or there can be efficient health care. There cannot be both. By its very nature a health care system controlled by health insurance companies that are mandated to cut expenditures and make profits is producing an inefficient and unacceptable health care system.

T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post journalist and the author of “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care,” recently wrote an interesting article about how we can compare how other developed countries in the world are providing health care for their people. This article was the result of world travel and research into how health care is done in these countries. The first point he made has been made by many writers so far and that is that the United States is the last of the developed countries in the free world that has not gone to national health care.

Reid compared systems from Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain, Canada, Japan, and Taiwan. He could easily have included other nations but he chose to stick with the industrialized free world. While doing his research he found some interesting facts. While in some countries peoples must deal with long lines for their care, in most countries this is not a problem. As for limited choices, some countries provide multiple choices for care and some provide only one.

He also found that in every country he researched, the costs were less than the cost of care in he U.S. “But in fact all other payment systems are more efficient than ours.” Among other things Reid looked at how cost controls stifle innovation and found this to also be a false fear.

“Any American who has had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation.

“Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the U.S., and MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)”

The Republican fear that competition is critical to provide the innovation needed for the U.S. to be on the cutting edge of state of the art medical care is simply not true. This has not been the case in criminal investigating or firefighting technology and it is not, nor will it be the case in medical care.

So let’s tell it like it is. As U.S. Republican Representative from Colorado, Mike Coffman, stated in his Sunday Op-Ed piece in the Denver Post:

“Although it is debatable whether the creation of a government-run insurance entity will inevitably lead to a single-payer system, it is simply naïve to think that it will not lead to the government dominating the health insurance market place…”

This is not only true, it is the whole point. The only reason the public option surfaced in the debate in the first place is because Republicans, being the pro business party they are, embarked upon a strategy to kill the idea of national health care to protect the businesses which are currently involved in the health care industry. The sad thing is that they actually believe that leaving health care to the free enterprise system will produce better health care in a more efficient manner than any other possible alternative. For them it is case closed, end of story. Free market competition is not only the best answer; it is the only answer. They are not interested in looking into how the rest of the world is handling health care. They don’t believe our health care system is broken in such a way that cannot be fixed by simply changing as little as possible so that the free market system will correct our health care problems on its own.

There have been some who have stated that it would be much more refreshing to see Democrats just admit that they want the single provider system in the first place. Again, initially, they did exactly that. The debate on health care reform began with the Democrats stating that they wanted national health care. The Democrats want everyone insured and everyone covered no matter what. They don’t want anyone denied health care for any reason and they don’t care about pre-existing conditions. This is not a bad goal at all.

Because compromise is how things get done in congress and because the parties are so polarized this has become a battle of strategies. Should health care be incorporated into the basic infrastructure of government responsibility along with highway maintenance, national parks, police, fire, and military protection? Or should health care remain in the hands of gigantic middlemen known as insurance companies?

Yes, the Democrats eventually would like to have the government take over the entire health care system. No, they are not hiding their agenda. During the continental congress of 1776, when John Adams vehemently opposed a constitution that did not make slavery illegal, Ben Franklin told him, “First things first, John. Let’s establish a country first. Then we can handle our problems.”

Rather than try to establish national health care immediately, the Democrats realize that this reform is too abrupt to accomplish so quickly, especially in the face of organized Republican opposition. So they are telling themselves, “First things first.” First they will get the public option which will by default make it impossible for insurance companies to compete and still make a profit. Without profits, insurance companies will bow out of the industry. They will not have to, but they will not willingly stay involved as non-profits. Then, with that accomplished, the Democrats can more realistically move toward an all inclusive national health care system.

Is national health care what America needs? When people on the street are asked this question, healthy people always answer differently than those who have had to face any health issues other than simple health maintenance. Anyone who has either been denied a procedure, treatment or medication or who has a relative who has been denied these things by the insurance companies will give a different answer than someone who needs no medicine or care other than an occasional physical or cold remedy. Those people are not among those who are denied coverage and because they haven’t run into that wall they are reluctant to see the need for major change.

This does not mean there is no need for change. When two of your needed prescriptions cost $125 each for a 30 day supply and when you need these prescriptions at a time in your life when you are living on a fixed income, something needs to change. If you own a small business and you cannot provide health insurance for your 15 employees without either you or your employees having to pay prices that are so high that they are simply unaffordable, something needs to change. If you have lost a limb because of an automobile or industrial accident and your insurance company either denies coverage or your co-pay cost is un-affordably high, something needs to change. If you had an accident at work that required expensive medical care and it was covered, but when you returned to work you only managed to keep your job for less than a year before the company you worked for found enough reasons to fire you, something needs to change. (And don’t think this example is un-related or that it doesn’t happen. It is, and it does, but that is a subject for a different article.)

With health insurance so expensive that major employers must compromise the quality of coverage just to be able to provide insurance at triple the cost of the previous year, something needs to change. So the answer to the question as to whether or not national health care is what America needs is a resounding yes. Must it take on a specific shape? Not necessarily. As Reid pointed out, there are many examples in the world to use as models. Some of these examples have more pronounced weaknesses than others. But all of them are more efficient than our current system, and all of them cost less. With our life expectancy and our infant mortality rate not even reaching the top ten on the world’s list, and with America landing at number 39 in the world list in terms of the quality of our over all health care—not making the switch to national health care would be a serious mistake. How else will we achieve universal coverage? How else will we eliminate from the equation entirely the possibility that we may not get the care we need because we cannot afford it?