I can’t find the quote, but I remember a health care executive saying it after cost cutting followed anyway in the wake of the health care reform defeat under Clinton. The health care industry, including the Greater New York Hospital Association and Local 1199, worked to defeat reform. The industry, at the time, had been given an unlimited budget and was exceeding it. With that sweet deal no wonder, given the amoral self interest of those organizations, that they opposed any change, regardless of how poorly the system served others. But managed care followed, and for a time at least, the income of health care workers was cut, if they could collect what they were owed at all. And today? Those who benefit from the system as it is continue to oppose health care reform. They’d better beware.
Today, senior citizens are against health care reform, to judge by the age of those protesting against it, and opponents, including Republicans, continue to pander to them. They get government funded health care, others pay, and then they shop at places that do not offer health insurance to their employees, so they can pay less. They pay lower taxes on the same income, and are running up such a massive debt that it is certain that younger generations won’t get anything like today’s Medicare when they get old. Today’s seniors and near seniors, part of Generation Greed, don’t care.
The public employee unions, once again, are against health care reform. They also get unlimited health insurance at unlimited cost at the expense of taxpayers who increasingly get nothing, with all that income not counted as such and tax free. If everyone had health insurance, they might have to pay higher prices or higher taxes to benefit those others; if health insurance was partially taxable, they’d pay as much in taxes as those no better off. So they are against.
The insurance companies are against health care reform. With that tax break, the federal government has set up a situation in which they have a monopoly on access to health care, on a pay now and MAYBE get health care later basis. They don’t have to worry about consumers feeling cheated, because they do deals with employers rather than consumers. Those consumers, as workers, are then locked to their employers (but not the other way around) if they become sick.
Well guess what will happen if reform goes down and younger generations realize that government funded or subsidized health care has nothing to offer them now, and will offer them nothing in the future? How about cutting Medicare down to “pay as you go” at today’s payroll tax rate?
And how about public employees? Guess what can be cut as state and local governments go broke without any effect on public services? Retiree health care, which most people don’t get, can be cut, and the amount public employees pay for health insurance can be increased.
And the insurance companies? Note how they have to get state permission to raise rates on auto insurance, with scrutiny of their bottom line. How about health insurance? They don’t want a public option? Through regulation, they might end up BEING the public option. If the government were running its own program, it might have a reasonable view of how much health insurers have to charge to make a modest profit. Without it, they could just decide how much they want voters to pay.
We are heading for federal, state and local fiscal crises, and facing those crises, we are either all in it together or we are not. If we are not all in it together, the solution is for younger generations and those without deals to make war on those who have made war on them, and take away what other people don’t get. Enough of all for some and none for others!
The Democrats had better deliver something that takes something away from the interests above and provides something for the rest, or else watch out! And I won’t want to hear about the Republicans, as obstructionist as they are. The Democrats were given enough of a majority to make such political gamesmanship irrelevant. Deliver or lose. In fact, out with anyone born before 1960!