"Health Insurance"

[Lorien]

Is it really? The Right Wing spins the concept of Universal Health care as "Socialized Medicine", filling the heads of their base with fears that instituting such a plan in America would put us on a slippery slope towards Marxism (although our "socialized" police, fire, school and library systems have yet to destroy our capitalist democracy). They say that with Universal Health care we'll have longer waits and more government bureaucracy which would be worse than the system that is now in place.

Have these people ever had a serious health concern and less than stellar insurance?? In my experience, even if you pay for the best "Health insurance" policy you can afford that doesn't necessarily mean that A). You will get to see a doctor or specialist in a reasonable amount of time-it may take days, it may take months, you may not get to see them at all. Plus the red tape and hoops involved could drive a Buddhist Monk to the brink. And B). Even life saving procedures can be denied by your "Health Insurance" company, which can lead to much poorer health and a premature death.

So, does "Health Insurance" really insure our health? Frame the issue: What term accurately describes the institutions known as "Health insurance companies"?

[NC_Nurse]

1. Profit assurance companies

That would be more honest.

[BlueJazz]

2. If we had Truth in Advertising, it would be called ...

"Blue Cross & Greasy Charley's Used Cars and Health Insurance"

[phillysuse]

3. Health Insurance is INSURANCE, not Health Care

Health insurance is to health care what automobile insurance is to car repair.

It is who pays for the care.

If I have my automobile insurance with Prudential and my car gets smushed, Prudential will, hopefully but not always cover the full cost of the automobile care. An adjuster will look at my car and tell me what they will pay. Then I will take my car to a mechanic who will fix it hopefully and be paid by Prudential. If I pick an incompetent mechanic, I may get a bad outcome but the mechanic is independent of the automobile insurance company.

Similarly everyone is confusing HEALTH INSURANCE with HEALTH CARE.
Edwards, Hillary and Obama have HEALTH INSURANCE PLANS, not HEALTH CARE PLANS.

Even single payer is an INSURANCE PLAN, not a health care plan.

A health care plan would discuss things like
1. Are there physicians available in the specialties that we need in every community? If not, what is the best way to distribute primary and specialty care? Can telemedicine play a role?
2. What are we doing about the nursing shortage? How can we train and retain more nurses?
3. What should we be doing with regard to prevention?
4. Should we require people to take care of themselves and should there be a carrot or a stick if they don't. For example, if Prenatal care were available to every pregnant woman and someone refused to go and instead was shooting up cocaine, should we 1)care 2) do anything 3) pay for drug rehab
4) pay for the NICU costs of her premature infant.

But these are hard and difficult and complex ideas and don't fit into a sound bite.

So instead the candidates are discussing INSURANCE but calling it HEALTH CARE.

[Lorien]

6. As difficult as it is, that's what we need: a sound bite

as you've pointed out; insurance does not equal health care. But how do we get that across to millions of voters who have somehow been duped into believing that "health insurance" is the only just and democratic way toward receiving health care? We'll either pay in taxes or pay in insurance premiums...my problem with the health insurance middleman is that it has PREVENTED me from receiving health care.

[rucky]

4. Dead Pools

You're basically betting against yourself.

[InvisibleTouch]

5. What term?

Parasites.

[Lorien]

7. To which we are all forced to become hosts

but seriously, how do we frame this issue-simply and understandably- so that Joe and Jane Average finally "get it". Repugs have their spin: "The left (those commies) want to force SOCIALIZED HEALTH CARE on us all"!!! It's a simple yet misleading concept that is easy for "average folks" to grasp. Where is OUR sound bite that sums up the case for ending our dependence on "health insurers"?

[Lorien]

8. C'mon DU! Where's all that creativity?

We can't continue to allow the GOP to frame the debate on the really important issues.


Ah well, I guess I should have put the word "taser" in the subject line. :shrug:

[donkeyotay]

9. They resort to a word "socialized" that has high Pavlovian values with the GOP

faithful. They think that one word can cut off thought. It's important to bring up other instances of "socialism" in our society. Water. Roads. Police. Fire. Military. There are many instances where society decides that a common service should not be delivered on a pay basis because supply and demand don't work compassionately when you need something as basic as water or health care.

[warren pease]

10. The nature of a single-payer system...

Stolen from my DU journal, and every point a potential sound bite:


One nation, one payer.

Everybody in, nobody out.

No pre-existing conditions.

No doctor bills.

No hospital bills.

No deductibles.

No co-pays.

No in network.

No out of network.

No corporate profits.

No more medical bankruptcies.


In my opinion, to get to single-payer, we need to separate the idea of health care from the idea of health insurance.

Health care is what happens when patients and health care professionals interact to, in the best case, successfully diagnose and treat a medical condition or injury.

Health insurance is the protection money you have to pay the middle man to enable this transaction and keep you out of bankruptcy court. Why would you want to give some parasite intermediary who does absolutely nothing to provide health care a single damn penny?

The relationship of health care to insurance is manufactured out of thin air by the US obsession with applying market-based, privatized solutions to nationalized social problems.

To create a rational system that doesn't require us to bet against our own mortality, that linkage must disappear in favor of a system that treats health care as a basic human right rather than a privilege to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

See Kucinich's plan for details: http://tinyurl.com/2ypqmz

He's the only candidate advocating single-payer, universal-access; the rest are all doing the corporate suck-up dance, dressing up the same tired, deadly system in a bunch of new happy talk that attempts to mask the continued focus on keeping insurance companies in the medical business and ensuring their continued profitability.

Shameless bastards that they are, they need to be called on their bullshit and exposed as liars and slaves to the status quo so dear to the hearts of their campaign "contributors."

Instead, Kucinich can't get a question in one of these asinine "debates," can't get any coverage in mass media (or more accurately, the only coverage he can get is when he's branded as a leftist whacko who wants to destroy everything that makes American great blah, blah, blah).


Fucking turncoats.

wp

[Lorien]

11. Excellent post

that "parasite intermediary" has only one goal: profit for their share holders. Until the public can be made to understand that "health insurers" will never be made to care about anyone's health care needs and that they shouldn't stand between us and our physicians nothing can change. Like you, I'm completely disgusted by the fact that every candidate's plan except Kucinich's includes the health insurance industry. Until we get corporate money out of politics we will likely only continue with the status quo, but we still need to hammer away on the public's acceptance of a single payer, universal access system in the meantime.