Getting the Ball Rolling
There was a really good article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the state of healthcare in America and the ways in which big business may finally be the ones who make the government realize that universal healthcare is where it’s at and where we need to go.
The way in which this relates to Portland (or at least Oregon), is that Senator Ron Wyden is at the forefront of the universal coverage battlefield. The article points out the failures in this arena before, but also discusses the ways in which businesses, which are often conservative-leaning politically, are reaching across the aisle as “universal health care has always been a liberal’s cause.” It also talks about the broad disagreement about what form universal healthcare should take and some of the challenges that will have to be dealt with (one of which has to do with a needed change in the executive branch that should come about in two years), but at least there’s some talk about it at the higher levels of government again.
As a fairly healthy and fairly solidly middle-class wage-earner who doesn’t use his company’s health insurance ’cause it’s unaffordable, this push is a welcome one. I also think it’s telling that at least part of the reason that this is happening is due to the personalization of the issue among some people who have not been affected by it before. At the end of the article, it’s revealed that Steve Burd, the chairman and CEO of Safeway supermarkets, has a son whose insurance applications have recently been denied, and that’s at least part of what has sparked Burd’s forays into the healthcare debate.
Funny how that works. Just like if there was a nationwide draft, the Iraq war would most likely have been over three years ago if it ever would’ve taken place at all.
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Thanks for raising this. Ironically, if everyone in Oregon had insurance, insurance rates for the currently insured would be lower. 10% of insurance premiums pay for the “cost shift” - the amount hospitals and other providers pass on to insurers who pass on to us for providing “free” care to the uninsured. This system doesn’t do much for the uninsured, and it isn’t such a deal for the insured, either.
Right you are. Even though the US private insurance system spends several times as much per capita on bureaucracy and other non-health related costs, and even though the US trails many countries that publicly finance health care in various indicators of health (like infant mortality), what’s finally brought us to this point is the fact that American businesses finally realized (after being told for decades) that they were competing with foreign companies who didn’t have to subsidize their employees’ health care, because their governments did. So now they either have to drop health coverage (as many are starting to) or get the government to take it over. It could hardly do worse — even our own Medicare system is far more efficient than private insurance, spending much less of its funding on overhead and administration.
As the example of the CEO’s son shows, the “greed is good” attitude rationalized by Reagan and his descendants has brought us to the place where, if it doesn’t affect ME personally, I don’t care about everyone else. (And usually the politicians who vote against health care for others claim to be the “moral” candidates. Denying health care to the poor so millionaires can get big tax cuts — that doesn’t sound like the Jesus I read about.) So now that the upper middle classes are starting to get squeezed by insurance companies’ greed, we can finally start addressing a problem that’s affected 40 million Americans for years (and sickened and killed who knows how many), in the world’s wealthiest nation.
The Times piece does a pretty good job of reminding us that even the much-derided Clinton plan had the support of much of the business community –except for the insurance companies, which killed it via lying ads and huge campaign contributions, mostly to their Republican allies. They’ve been able to kill rational health care since at least the Truman administration, but maybe, finally that’s about to change. Oh well, even if it’s for the wrong reasons (greed), I’m glad that maybe we’ll finally have a system that actually works for someone besides insurance company executives. Good for Wyden, Kitzhaber et al for being a part of it.