Business and the Public Option

Opposition to the public option in health care is an economic mistake. Private insurance costs too much, limits and denies services, and insures only healthy people. Employers and employees carry an intolerable cost with no limits, growing at twice or three times the rate of the economy. Half of all bankruptcies are because of medical costs. Under the current system, if you lose your job between 50 and 65 years of age, employers won’t hire you because older workers on the payroll increase their medical plan costs. If you are laid off at 50, you will most likely be underemployed or unemployed and without insurance until you reach 65 and qualify for government-funded Medicare. The cost of private health care to individuals is being widely discussed, and by now only people who are willfully illiterate can fail to know that the public option would be better for individuals. If you don’t know this, read something.

On the business side, the staggering cost of health care to companies diminishes our ability to compete in the world economy. Whatever business you are running, from a college to a barbershop, a person in any other developed nation can do better for less money and make more profit, because their government picks up the tab for employee health care. Sure, taxes are a bit higher, but with taxes as in other areas you get what you pay for. The employer cost of private health care is the second highest cost after employee salaries for most American businesses. Employers pay this because until now government, influenced by obligation to corporate donors to campaigns, has refused to pick up the responsibility for insuring the health of the American workforce. The public option that is on the table now is a true stimulus package for American businesses. It is a mistake for business to feel kinship with medical insurance companies because they are “businesses.” They have no product that contributes to or enhances your product or makes you operate better or more efficiently. Their relationship to other businesses is not contributory, but parasitic.

Promoting the public option

To all people 18-65 whose health insurance is too expensive and/or inadequate:

The government already is the largest single payer of health insurance—just in the worst possible way. Taxpayers pay for all high-risk people through Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP. In the low-risk group (age18-65), government employees have government-subsidized policies. Military personnel have government health care. These groups include more than half, and by some counts, a good two-thirds of Americans.

Taxpayers eventually pay for the uninsured. We pay emergency room costs for neglected illness that could have been treated earlier in less expensive ways. Also, Medicare costs more for people coming in at age 65 from the uninsured population than for those who had health insurance. The higher cost persists for several years as a group statistic, and for individuals it the higher cost may last a lifetime. Taxpayers pick up this extra cost of Medicare that is a delayed effect of working-age people not having health care.

Working people age 18 to 65 employed in private business and industry, self-employed, or whose work is interrupted (seasonal, lay-offs, etc.) are the demographic with the lowest statistical risk of serious illness. Most of us in this category do not have adequate health care. Either we have nothing, or we have "health insurance," that does all of the bad things our reluctant government-insured representatives in Washington say that single-payer health care will do: it limits choice and controls access. Plus it costs us, sometimes literally, an arm and a leg.

The only demographic not currently supported by the taxpayer is relatively strong, healthy, independent people age 18 to 65. People in this group have been tossed to the insurance companies so that they can wring out profits. This abandonment is literally a gift to corporate interests made by politicians who serve the companies, not the people.

Adding the 18-65 low-risk group to the government health care pool will even out and ultimately lower health care costs across the board. We know this because it is the principle by which private insurance decides who is profitable to insure and who they will deny.

We need health care, not health insurance.

Health care is a right, not a privilege.

Working Americans should be calling their representatives and senators, telling them we are sick of health insurance and we want health care. And tell them they need to quit selling us to corporate interests.

Not the Lord's Prayer

I know freedom of speech is a real democratic value, but this?

I am impressed by how much hatred can reside in a head that looks like a plastic baby doll.