In his State of the Union address, President Obama asked if anyone had a better idea to hold down the cost of health care, cover the uninsured, and reduce the deficit. I laid out the problems, proposals, problems with the proposals, my solution, and how to pay for it back when in the attached document, and my views haven’t changed. Just my optimism.
The current bills would be an improvement over what we have now. But they would also maintain the tie between health insurance and place of work that is limiting flexibility in the economy, discouraging entrepreneurship, and making those laid off over age 50 damn near unemployable. They would also either maintain the unlimited tax subsidy for health insurance, no matter how wasteful or excessive, or include different rules for different groups of workers. The Senate bill doesn’t have a public option, meaning the required subsidy for private insurance would be whatever the insurance companies said it was, because (unlike Medicare and Medicare managed care) there would be nothing to compare it with. The House bill has as a public option that, like Medicare, has the government dictate prices, raising the specter that the future of the health care industry would be determined by relative political power, as in New York’s Medicaid program.
Doing nothing means all the selfish beneficiaries of the current system continue to take more and more, and the less well off and younger generations — who will not receive Medicare at all if unchecked spending bankrupts the federal government — are sacrificed more and more. The inadequacy of the current bills is no excuse for inaction — they should either be merged and adopted or improved and passed — NOW.
We are either all in it together or we are not. Why should I and my children pay taxes for government funded or tax-subsidized health care for others even though when we needed it I may not receive it and my children certainly won’t? If we can’t do it for everyone twenty years from now, we shouldn’t be doing it for anyone today. Pass health care reform or repeal Medicare, or at least means test it away from the best of 20 percent or cut it back to what is funded by the current tax and premiums rather than debt. NOW — not when I hit 65 and the current generation of senior citizens has passed on.