Guaranteed Healthcare

As a vehicle for health care reform, Mitt Romney's flawed Massachusetts' plan is breaking down after a year on the road.  The plan fails to deliver the health care reform goods as promised. There ought to be a law against repackaging and reselling this lemon to the public. 

It's been a year since Massachusetts required individuals to have health insurance.  Sounds like a great idea if you're an insurance underwriter working for a company that sells insurance.  With the notable exception of Dennis Kucinich, all the other leading candidates for president are kicking the tires and taking the Massachusetts lemon for a spin.  They're dickering over the cosmetics and the deductibles as they cruise into the primaries riding a plan that belongs in a scrap heap surrounded by junkyard dogs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/politics/25mass.html?ex=1353646800&en=a9df80169dfe1d22&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Major problems with the plan are being reported by the New York Times.  Now, whaddya say we have a look under the hood of this fast-track profit driven machine? 

The first problem is the insurers' plan to raise the costs 10 to 12 percent next year!  ("Twice this year's national average.")  So, the plan fails to control costs.  When we "let the market decide", it will always decide to maximize profit. Afterall, an insurance underwriters' job is to deny coverage to individuals with health care needs and protect insurers from the cost of having to care for them.    

A closer inspection reveals another problem. The costs to the state to subsidize premiums for the poor will exceed its budget by nearly $150 million dollars!  When you stop to consider that a third of that money will be wasted on administrative costs, advertising, and inflated insurance company executive compensation packages, (instead of providing care for the sick and injured), it takes your breath away like a high speed head on crash.  This "lemon" is careening dangerously out of control.

Oh, and the penalty for failing to sign up for one of the mandated plans?  Individuals forfeit their personal state income tax exemption.  According to the story in The N.Y. Times, the exemption is worth $219.  Next year the penalty more than doubles!  The cost of the cheapest high deductible, bare bones plan is at least $1000.  Corporate welfare is alive and well in Massachusetts!  Where's the public benefit?

We can't afford to give away public resources to private corporations for their exclusive benefit.  Insurance company mandates are not about controlling costs; they're about controlling the insurance industry's ability to make a profit. As a nurse, I'm offended that insurance companies are allowed to make a profit, (by charging co-pays, limiting or denying care, exclusions and high deductibles), at the expense of my patient's misfortune and misery.  Patients deserve nursing care, medical, dental and psychiatric care based on need, not on ability to pay.  

We need to establish a guaranteed national health service plan that is comprehensive, affordable, equitably funded, publicly administered, and publicly accountable.  With a public system we would finally be free of the bureaucratic nightmare of private plans.  We need to demand that our politicians get these individual mandated "lemons" off the road and clear a path to real health care reform that will control costs and insure equitable access and distribution of resources: single payer guaranteed health care for all.