Michelman’s conclusion: the situation won’t change for anyone until political leaders get serious about comprehensive reform. “By comprehensive, I mean that piecemeal approaches will not work—not economically, not morally,” she says. But piecemeal is what the country is likely to get. Some enterprising reporter needs to take these stories further and show exactly how piecemeal will or won’t help those falling through the cracks.
How would a public plan option (seemingly the only thing talked about these days) help people like Roy Scales—or would it? Would it solve the dilemma of paying for long-term care that Michelman’s husband needs? FYI: No one has talked at all about long-term care during the presidential campaign or afterward. It’s like the need for it doesn’t exist in the political mind. Why isn’t the COBRA provision in the stimulus package helping middle class folks laid off in Las Vegas? Will reform actually change the way medical care is financed, to ease the budget squeeze on safety net hospitals? How will reform deal with the growing problem of underinsurance?
The pols and special interests have been touting the notion that Americans who have insurance can keep what they have. But do Americans really want to keep those policies that send them to the poor house when serious illness happens? These are a few of the things the public needs to know to engage in a debate that will certainly affect them.
This comes from a cynical septuagenarian, but I would like to see Trudy’s vital question, “ … do Americans really want to keep those policies that send them to the poor house when serious illness happens?” tattooed across the foreheads of every legislator in Washington—little good that it would do.
Instead, I have the haunting, ugly suspicion that we can take as the course of any “reform” we may see as following the model of Bush and the 104th Congress with their MMA 2003 (Medicare Modernization Act of 2003) and the resulting Medicare Part D: Specifically, that there will be no serious consideration of cost containment, that the magical answer in an “ownership society” is to allow the untrammeled advance of costs increases through providers and private insurance companies. Part D provided that these unmitigated costs were transferred from older American to the larger population and that can't be done with general health care reform, but legislative chutzpah will allow whatever measures are passed to be presented to us as the carnival huckster's dream; it will waddle and quack like a duck but we'll call it “reform.”
#1 Posted by Joel Stookey, CJR on Wed 15 Apr 2009 at 06:32 AM
This comes from a cynical septuagenarian, but I would like to see Trudy’s vital question, “ … do Americans really want to keep those policies that send them to the poor house when serious illness happens?” tattooed across the foreheads of every legislator in Washington—little good that it would do.
Instead, I have the haunting, ugly suspicion that we can take as the course of any “reform” we may see as following the model of Bush and the 104th Congress with their MMA 2003 (Medicare Modernization Act of 2003) and the resulting Medicare Part D: Specifically, that there will be no serious consideration of cost containment, that the magical answer in an “ownership society” is to allow the untrammeled advance of costs increases through providers and private insurance companies. Part D provided that these unmitigated costs were transferred from older American to the larger population and that can't be done with general health care reform, but legislative chutzpah will allow whatever measures are passed to be presented to us as the carnival huckster's dream; it will waddle and quack like a duck but we'll call it “reform.”
#2 Posted by Joel Stookey, CJR on Wed 15 Apr 2009 at 06:34 AM