Blatant Hypocrisy in the Effort to Destroy Universal Health Care

Time for change

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Aug-05-09 08:30 PM
Original message

Blatant Hypocrisy in the Effort to Destroy Universal Health Care

Edited on Wed Aug-05-09 08:37 PM by Time for change

Anybody who�s been following the health care debate knows that the American people want universal health care much more than do their elected representatives. When 18 years of polling in a democratic country consistently shows that a clear majority of people believe that government should guarantee health care for all, the continued absence of such a system is a good indication that democracy isn�t working very well in that country. The strong association between the receipt of campaign contributions from the health insurance industry (and other special interests) and the obstruction of meaningful health care reform goes a long way towards explaining how our system of government is failing us today.

Just as important are the many millions of dollars that the special interests spend on propaganda to dissuade the American people against the need for meaningful health care reform. Between that propaganda and the echoing of that propaganda by the politicians who are in bed with the special interests, the United States of America has never had universal health care and remains the only industrialized country in the world today without it.

Since there are no good arguments against universal health care, these propagandists rely totally on misinformation, lies, and confused logic to drive home their points. They use a great many of these arguments. In this post I�ll talk about three of the most hypocritical of them:

�Government run health care will result in health care rationing�

First of all, let�s get something straight. None of the health care plans on the table today � not even single payer plans � involve �government run health care�. I�m not saying that wouldn�t be a good idea (It works pretty well for the military), but that�s not what is being proposed today, and any attempt to imply that it is is simply dishonest. To the contrary, what is being proposed by progressives are national health insurance plans � to ensure that the vast majority of Americans have access to decent health care.

All health insurance plans ration health care
So, what does �rationing� mean in the context of health insurance? It simply means an insurance plan that does not pay for every conceivable kind of medical care. That is, the plan makes distinctions between what kinds of health care are worthy of being included in their clients� policies and what kinds are not.

The most hypocritical aspect of those who disparage government health insurance with the claim that �the government will ration health care� is that ALL HEALTH INSURANCE PLANS RATION THE HEALTH CARE THEY PROVIDE. That is not a criticism of those health insurance plans. But the failure to mention that obvious fact while disparaging government health insurance for doing the same thing is hypocrisy of the highest order.

Any reasonable health insurance plan would exclude at least some treatments that have not been shown to be beneficial, that have been shown to be far less beneficial than other available treatments for the same medical conditions, and treatments that are inordinately expensive compared to the benefits that they bestow. Failure to do that would mean that the plan would have little or no ability to control costs � and as we all know, cost control is imperative in today�s health care environment in which costs are continually spiraling out of control. Therefore, as David Leonhardt notes in �Health Care Rationing Rhetoric Overlooks Reality�, �The choice isn�t between rationing and not rationing. It�s between rationing well and rationing badly.�

Government can ration health care much better than private insurance companies
So the question we should be considering is not whether or not government will ration health care. The question is how it will ration health care compared to how health care is currently rationed by private insurance companies.

Currently, health care is rationed in numerous ways. Most glaring is the fact that 47 million Americans � many of them children � have no health insurance whatsoever. Health care is rationed for those people simply by virtue of the fact that they have little or no money to pay for it.

Then consider the nearly two hundred million Americans who have private health insurance, and ask yourself how their rationing of health care compares to how government would ration it. The most important thing to consider is the non-health care related costs that are involved. Private health insurance companies use the health insurance premiums they receive from their customers to pay for propaganda... I mean marketing, lobbying, bribery... I mean campaign contributions, multi-million dollar giveaways... I mean salaries for their CEOs, and then they have to have enough money left over for profits for their investors. By contrast, a government health insurance plan would not have to pay for marketing, lobbying, or campaign contributions, it would not pay out multi-million dollar salaries to anyone, and it would be non-profit.

What would be the significance of the vast differences between the non- health care related expenses of private insurances companies compared to those of government? That would represent a great amount of money that would be available to the government to pay for actual health care � health care that private insurance companies routinely deny because they have relatively little money left after paying for all those other things mentioned above. In other words, it is a near certainty that government will provide more health care and ration it less than private insurance companies.

But what if government does ration health care more than private insurance companies?
That leaves one last question about health care rationing. What should people do in the highly unlikely event that a government run health insurance plan rations health care more than private health insurance plans do? Or more likely, what if some Americans simply believe that there health care will be rationed more by the government plan than by their private insurance companies? The answer to that is simple. If you believe that your private insurance company plan is better than the government run health insurance plan, then just stay with your private plan.

�Health care isn�t a right�

The assertion that health care isn�t a right is an attack on the very core of the rationale for universal health care. Beyond that, it is an attack against any humanitarian endeavor. Some 20 thousand Americans die every year because they have no health insurance. Therefore, saying that they don�t have a right to health care is tantamount to saying that they don�t have a right to live. I don�t understand how any moral person could say that.

I�m not a follower of religion, but since Christianity is the most common religion in the United States, I think it�s worth quoting a Christian minister on the subject:

Jesus was a healer, and healing was one of the most important aspects of his ministry. The gospels are replete with stories of Jesus healing the sick� He cared deeply for the spiritual welfare of all. He empowered others "to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal" (Luke 9:2). He never refused to heal someone because they could not pay, and pre-existing conditions were his specialty�.

Nevertheless, those who maintain an interest in keeping health care inaccessible to those who lack the money to pay for it � Christian and non-Christian alike � come up with all kinds of arguments to justify their inhumanity. Here�s a good one by Clifford Asness:

Listing rights generally involves enumerating things you may do without interference (the right to free speech) or may not be done to you without your permission. They are protections, not gifts of material goods. Material goods and services must be taken from others, or provided by their labor, so if you believe you have an absolute right to them, and others don't choose to provide it to you, you then have a "right" to steal from them. But what about their far more fundamental right not to be robbed?

In other words, Asness is saying that nobody has a right to material goods � even material goods that are necessary for life itself � because having a right to material goods involves stealing them from someone else. Or in other words, giving people the right to health care would be tantamount to making health care providers, such as insurance companies, give us health care for free.

That argument stands reality on its head. No currently proposed health care plan would require health insurance companies or anybody else to provide people with health care for free. All we are asking the health insurance companies for is to get out of the way and quit trying to buy off our elected representatives to squelch health care reform. The purpose of a democratic form of government is for people to get together to develop means for serving each other�s needs � as a community. Health care is paramount among those needs. To those who don�t like that, I say: You�re free to leave. We don�t need you.

�Government run health insurance will be unfair to insurance companies�

The insurance companies and their right wing supporters have a big conundrum when they try to pass this one off on us. On the one hand, they want to whine about government run health insurance providing �unfair� competition to the insurance companies. But how to do that without making it seems as if government run health insurance is actually better than private health insurance?

The answer is to play the �Big Bad Government� card � make government out to be public enemy # 1. Here�s an example from Asness�s article, to justify his whining about government competition to the private insurance industry:

The government does not co-exist or compete fairly with private enterprise, anywhere. It does not play well with others� It cannot compete fairly while it owns the armed forces and courts. Finally, it cannot be a fair competitor� The first thing the government does is under-price the private system�. The government can always under-price competition, not through the old fashioned way of doing it better, they never do that, but by robbing Peter to pay for Paul�. Second, the government ultimately always cheats when it's involved in "honest" competition�

No, you idiot! The reason why the government can easily under-price private insurance companies is that it doesn�t have to pay for marketing, lobbying, and bribing politicians, while still making a profit and paying out multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs. There is nothing difficult to comprehend about that. If you think that�s cheating, your intellectual capacities are beyond hope.

The whole purpose of government involvement in health care is to ensure that the American people have access to decent health care � NOT to help the private insurance industry to continue to screw the American people. That goal is accomplished in part by ensuring that the insurance they provide is allocated to health care � NOT to all the other things for which health insurance companies use the money that they obtain from their customers.

Government is NOT inherently all those bad things that Asness and his fellow right wingers claim it to be � although it can be. In a democracy, government IS the people, or at least it is elected to represent them. So if the United States government, acting on behalf of the American people, chooses to put the American people above the profits of the health insurance industry and other special interests, it would behoove those special interests to stop whining about it and lying about it.

In conclusion

As a consequence of the need for private insurance companies to make profits, lavish princely sums of money on their CEOs and do all the other things that they do in their quest for profits, they are enticed into developing many creative ways to deny health care to their customers. In the beginning of this post I talked about health care rationing by health insurance companies. They not only ration health care up front, by pre-specifying it in their policies, but they often do so retroactively as well. As most of us know, health insurance companies often cheat their customers in order to increase their profits.

The cause of good health for the American people is not furthered by having health insurance companies act as intermediaries between them and their doctors. Health insurance companies exist to make a profit, not to provide health care. They have repeatedly shown that any time they can sacrifice the latter to increase the former, they are likely to do so. In short, the consumers of private health insurance do not benefit from the many billions of dollars that the health insurance industry spends on marketing, lobbying, campaign contributions, and the rewarding of their investors and CEOs. To the contrary, the American consumers of health care suffer from those many drains on their health care premiums, in the form of denied health care coverage. It is well past time to replace that system with something much better.

It is now up to the American people. In the coming weeks and months we will be continuously bombarded by insurance company misinformation, lies and all kinds of assorted propaganda. The American people will either see through that propaganda and put pressure on their elected representatives to put the interests of their constituents above the interests of the big moneyed special interests�. or they won�t.