Editorial: Sensible Health Insurance - a progressive perspective
Common sense dictates that benefiting as a consequence of the misfortune of others is immoral. This is precisely what for profit private insurance does. Its sole purpose is to maximize profit for the benefit of its shareholders. Who are these share holders? A sizable portion of private insurance stock is owned by its top executives and Board members. Profits are maximized by restricting and/or denying service resulting in the availability of funds for outrageous bonuses.
Free market ideologues claim that a public health care plan would ration medical care. Rationing already exists. It is called ability to pay. Those fortunate to have “Gold Standard Insurance” or wealthy can receive the very best care. Those with standard insurance may be denied certain tests or treatments and may only select Doctors approved by their insurance plan. Thus it is private “Bean Counter” bureaucrats who stand between patient and physician; not the government.
The purposeful fabrication that we must take more time to discover what will work is simply a delaying tactic. We already know what works. It’s called Medicare. The standard Medicare plan permits patients to select a physician of their choosing and allows that physician to provide testing and treatment as appropriate. There is no ethically valid reason to support a system of health care that allows those most fortunate to receive a higher level of care than anyone else. Medicare for all provides the basis for a single payer universal health insurance program. Only a single payer system can contain costs which are inflated for the purpose of rewarding share holders. If all are covered by a single publicly financed plan this will assure that the best quality of care is available to all and it will restrain those who would restrict care for financial reasons. One need only to look at what happened to the notion of privatizing Social Security to realize that a single payer public health insurance plan would be tamper proof.
Other advantages also attend a single payer public health care plan. A database of medical records in standard format can be made available to authorized care providers to assist physicians in their duties. This data base can also be used, in cooperation with appropriate medical boards, to identify patterns of practice, and with the assistance of the American Statistical Society, to evaluate patient outcomes. Such collaboration must be undertaken in a collegial not confrontational environment. Accountants and Lawyers should therefore be excluded from participation in such endeavors because their professions thrive upon confrontation. Their roles should be limited to discovery and prosecution of fraud, for fraud motivated by greed will develop in any unguarded system.
In the 1870’s Kanzler Otto von Bismarck introduced a single payer health insurance plan to the Prussian Empire. It has been in existence now for over 130 years and has worked very well, even through two devastating world wars. No one ever accused Herr Bismarck of being a socialist. Anything less than a single payer publicly funded health insurance plan is an abandonment of the progressive agenda and those who would compromise deserve no support now or in the future from the “Liberal” community.
- Richard C. Gardiner (the man partly responsible for spawning Reformerus_Gianticus) ◦
