28th
Socializing Insurance Regulations Isn’t Socialized Medicine
I like to figure out the news. I mean, I love watching the news, but more than watching it, I like to try and find the angle on what drives it.
I just returned from a couple weeks in Argentina and Brazil. Whenever I return to the States after spending some time abroad, I try to catch up on the content and tone of what are the lead stories on the news. It’s pretty interesting to see what news content doesn’t really show up overseas, but drives the news-cycle here.
One of the conversations that’s obviously really hot right now is all the chatter around “Obamacare.” People are either championing health care reform or staging protests to retain their freedoms by keeping the government out of their health care (I imagine most of those protesting actually have insurance).
It’s actually pretty funny when you stop. Press the pause button. Read the facts. And unwind the conversation a tiny bit.
Our government isn’t technically discussing health care reform, the conversation is actually about providing coverage—insurance.
Insurance is what makes health care available, accessible and affordable.
In 2009, if you don’t have insurance, access to very basic health care is pretty hard to access.
Most people in the USA who do have health insurance don’t actually pay for it themselves. Their employers pay for it. I’d bet that if most of these people had to pay for it out of their own pockets, they probably couldn’t afford it (I have seen some pretty outrageous monthly premiums for some pretty healthy people).
Health insurance is expensive. It’s usually not that great either—a lot of us who are covered routinely complain about our plans, deductibles and the loopholes written into them.
The people I know in the USA who have the best health insurance plans are public school teachers, post office workers, current/former military personnel, firefighters and police officers. All of these folks are technically employed by the government and so technically have a government supplied, government run health care plan (paid for by our tax dollars).
It seems to upset people that the government wants to mandate insurance reform by requiring people to have coverage or by offering insurance plans paid for and run by the government. Tagging this as socialized medicine is misleading. Tagging this as socialized anything scares people.
But let’s remember, we have some pretty successful government run (socialized) organizations in the USA. For example, though far from perfect, the public school system is pretty awesome, and most people I know are a beaming product of it.
And, despite the fact they can’t seem to figure out how much they want to charge for stamps (just pick a price and stick with it for a while—please!) our mail system is pretty amazing and incredibly efficient—trust me, I’ve lived in a few countries where it’s less than predictable or prompt.
Even though the government runs our public schools and our post offices, we still have private options. Between 1st and 12th grades I went to 3 different public schools and attended 4 different private schools. I also routinely opt to use Fed-Ex and UPS even though the government’s mail system is reliable.
In the best of socialized systems people still have the choice to use (and pay a little extra for) privatized options.
Look, I think most reasonable people would agree that the heath care industry, pharmaceutical companies and the insurance conglomerates are gauging the American public by making the basics unaffordable.
So let’s refocus the conversation around what the real discussion is: health care coverage reform. Let’s dial down the partisan dividing lines and be honest that things need to change.
