Choice is good, right? In the United States, everyone wants to take charge of his or her own destiny. We would all prefer to have a choice when it comes to our housing, our food, our employment, our mate, our family size---and our health care.

Well, not quite all of us. To a handful of Americans, those who are getting rich from the current, broken health care system, choice is as scary at the Jabberwock.

Republicans, many in the pay of the private health insurance industry, are attempting to frame the discussion of private versus public health insurers as one of choice. However, what they call “choice” is actually a working monopoly that sucks up health care dollars and leaves us broke while doing nothing to improve the quality of our public health----which happens to be piss poor. Our right to choose is restricted by pharmaceutical companies which extend patents on their drugs for decades, pricing many treatments out of the reach of the average American. It is limited by health insurers who attempt to play doctor (i.e. deny necessary care) in order to increase their profits. In many cases, we are denied any choice at all, because the insurance companies say that we are “too risky to insure.” No insurance means no health care, which is not a choice (though the GOP would call it one). It is more like a curse.

“But we can not afford to tamper with the greatest health care system in the world” chants the right wing chorus. In small part, they are motivated by a misguided sense of patriotism which goes something like If America tortures, then it must be ok. If the American health care system makes infants die, then infant mortality must be ok. However, their allegiance to the current system is more a matter of economics than of principle.



http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/3...

Why spend so much money to sell America the “best health care system in the world”? Why does anyone have a massive advertising budget? Some products are so good that they sell themselves. Others are so inferior that the dealer has to hire a team of experts to persuade folks to purchase their lemons. Or fear the Jabberwock.

Just how bad is the current U.S. health system? At the present time, we spend a combination of private and public dollars that amounts to around $5000 a person a year on health care. This is over twice as much as any other industrialized nation spends. Just our public contribution exceeds that of some western European countries. For our money, we do not get gold plated Cadillac health care. No, we get scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel- many-Eastern-Europeans-would-be-embarrassed-by-our-standards health care. And almost 50 million of us can not even get that. The Medical Industrial Complex---health insurers, drug companies, hospitals---like to brag about how we have the finest health care system in the world. However, the only measure in which we excel is the amount of money we pay people who work in the health care industry. American health care is a great way to get rich. If you are looking to extend your life expectancy, you should consider moving to some other country.

When something is this broken, maybe we should consider fixing it.

Today, President Obama joined other prominent Democrats who have called for a combination of both a publicly financed health plan as well as the continuation of our current system of many private insurers.



http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNew...

Sounds good to me. Offer folks a choice. They can opt for a public payer like Medicare, which has a proven record of low overhead and relatively limited hassles. Or, they can stick with designer health insurance, Blue Cross, United Health or any of the others which promise you the sun and the moon as long as you do not want to actually make use of them. Glamor versus quality. Hmmm? I wonder what most Americans will choose?

The private health insurance industry has a pretty good idea how things will go under a system that gives people more choice. If we no longer have to pay extra to be told “You can not get the treatment your doctor ordered”, most people will opt for paying less to get more. That is why they want to kill the public health insurance option in its cradle.




Ingeniously, the health insurance industry has made its own incompetence a centerpiece in its arguments against a public system. If people are offered the public option, we are told, they will all recognize it as superior, and they will sign up for it in droves, leaving the private insurers penniless. Therefore, in order to protect the current (failing) system we must not offer people a choice.

To which I can only reply “If our current system of private insurance is so bad that people will opt out of it to get on a Medicare like system, then why the hell would we want to salvage it?”

Mind, I am not advocating the dismantling of our current system. Those who insist that we can have only public health insurance or private health insurance are wrong. Even though education is guaranteed to every American child and we all pay taxes to support the public schools, a sizable number of U.S. citizens still opt to send their kids to private schools.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?i...

There will always be people willing to spend a little extra money to get something different. In other words, they will pay more for increased choice. In England, some people use the private health care system, even though they also qualify for National Health. Privates are not driven out of business. They just have to offer people something that is worth the money.

Asking Congress to force us to pay extra for less is ---well, it is just plain backwards. Like something out of Alice in Wonderland





If someone wraps a pig in a blanket and tells you that it is a baby, you are not obligated to make it your heir. If the medical industrial complex says that choice is not choice and that denying us choice is choice, we do not have to buy their crazy rhetoric.