Guaranteed Healthcare

The Wall Street Journal yesterday printed an opinion piece on an "innovative" reform pushed through Florida's state legislature by Governor Charlie Crist. "The Florida Revelation" reported on the "Cover Florida" plan, which makes healthcare affordable for Florida's 3.8 million uninsured.

How, you ask? By lowering and quality and restricting the amount of care received, of course!

Crist’s ill-considered plan is neither a humane nor effective solution to the healthcare crisis in Florida or nationally.

The Journal criticizes the state of Florida for placing 50 mandates on insurance companies to provide a basic "floor" of care for Floridians. Obviously this is just a stopgap provision-- ideally, we would like to do away with the insurance companies altogether-- but outlining a fundamental guide of what insurers should legally provide to consumers is probably a good thing. In fact, the lack of such minimum care requirements is one of the reasons CNA/NNOC opposed ABX1:1, California's faux healthcare reform bill of 2007.

The "Cover Florida" plan would work by removing those mandates for insurers providing policies to those 'uninsurables' with low incomes or pre-existing conditions. As the editorial reads, "insurance companies will be permitted to sell stripped-down, no-frills policies..." By allowing insurers to “opt out” of certain basic and crucial services, Crist will be creating a sub-class of Floridians who can afford coverage but receive no actual care in return. This is junk insurance, plain and simple, and by refusing to hold insurers to a basic standard of service, Crist is allowing them to skim millions in profits in exchange for selling the empty title of “covered” to Florida’s under- and uninsured.

As the hundreds of people who have logged onto this website to tell their story can attest, there is a huge difference between "coverage" and "care."

The problem in Florida is not the uninsured, the problem is the insurance companies themselves, who exist to make profits by denying care to those who need it. The only sensible solution to our nation’s healthcare fiasco is to provide a single standard of care for everyone, at a markedly lower cost than insurance, with about 10 percent of the overhead of insurance companies: that solution is single payer.