This is not my idea for a proposed policy for a national health care system--it was a policy question put to a class at Georgetown. I like this idea so very much that I'm publicizing it and have tweaked it to include unfortunate individuals under its umbrella.
Everyone with a social security number will have attached to this number a health care account for one million dollars. This money can be used for any health care expense. It can be used for dental care, vaccinations, eye care and glasses or lenses, diagnostic procedures, insurance premiums, psychiatric care, or any other health care expense. Only the person with the account (under that particular social security number) can use that account, and it cannot be passed on after that person dies. It can be used for that person and that person alone.
I've always felt that a single payer system would be the ideal except for two considerations: the difficult (prohibitive) transition from what we have to single payer; and the fact that in our country we just don't seem to be able to keep unscrupulous persons from gouging. With the million dollar accounts, every person would treat this as his or her own money (since it essentially is) and would examine every bill and challenge every charge. One of the most important considerations in every major policy change is the ease of transition. The million dollar accounts system would cause the least amount of ripples of any system I've studied. People who now have insurance can keep that insurance or consider other options, and they can take their time making that decision and making any changes.
As a society, we will be the strongest we can be going into the future since children would get the eye, dental, and any other care that they need to come of age in the best health possible.
This plan does come up short for care for children born with expensive conditions, those that would cost more than the million dollars. Expensive conditions might affect someone at any age. These unfortunate individuals could perhaps apply for an extension, based on the fact that this expensive condition was not brought on by their own behavior, and that they have been good stewards of their accounts.
Every other nation on the planet has national health care. But the U.S. has to make money on everything it does. We've lost our capacity to be human beings and care about other human beings and this is the direct result of our peculiar form of capitalism.
ReplyDeleteWe could fund national health care tomorrow with a few cuts to the Pentagon budget. But the Regime excels at pitting one segment of the population against the other. They just need to convince the working-class Republicans (of which there are more than you would think)that national health care is "communism" and you saw the results with people protesting "Obamacare". They actually showed up to such protests here armed with semiautomatic weapons (legal under Arizona state law, believe it or not.) Why the weapons? Well, the message was clear: They just might decide to resort to armed violence to stop national health care. And also to intimidate the "Left" who, by and large, are not gun owners. This is usually the type of thing you see among Hamas or Hezbollah, but we have the same extremists here. The Republican Party loved it! They had plausible deniability since this was the "Tea Party" for the most part and the Republicans claim that's not their puppet show. But it's rather like Hamas claiming they don't know who's supplying suicide bombers. This also worked for Obama who had no intention of a single-payer system of universal health care for all. He could claim people didn't support it. Plus, he was committed to "working within the system" meaning giving a big fat gift to the insurance companies.
Many Americans, for the most part, are not well-educated enough to understand what is happening now and where this road eventually leads. Two wars are going on (we pulled out of Iraq, but we still have a small force there as well as our mercenaries) with a third and possibly a fourth waiting in the wings (Iran and Syria) but to look around, you wouldn't know it. The media deludes us with pabulum about celebrities. They also swell the news with "junk news" and outright propaganda supplied by PR outfits and corporate-run and military-run think tanks. This is how the government defeats things, or brings things into being, without a true public consensus. Before a war starts, the news agencies will already have the logo and theme music ready, as they did with the Iraq War. This is what happened to universal health care. The whole "Tea Party" was and is a Republican false-flag operation designed to build a false sense of "public outrage" against national health care. The dupes who think they're somehow being "patriots" are quite mistaken. They're puppets and if any of them were better educated, they would have known this. Obama, for his part, used the Tea Party to get out of keeping a promise he had no intention of keeping, that being universal health care.
Americans have bought into the paranoiac fear of "communism" since the beginning of the Cold War. We've lost about a hundred thousand lives in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Yet, even after the USSR has been gone for decades, this fear persists. It's the reincarnation of McCarthyism; always a crowd-pleaser in the United States. All one needs to do is accuse someone or some institution of communism and that entity will then spend all its time defending itself and disavowing communism and lose sight of its real mission. This is how they made universal health care a dirty word. If one person spent all his time worrying about, say, Imperial Japanese troops led by Tojo landing on the beaches of California, people would say that man is insane and needs serious help. But all of America does this with this ridiculous fear of "communists" and no one dares suggest that this is insanity on a national scale. But that's what it is: Insanity on a national scale.
Communism is not a paranoia or unnatural fear. To say this I can only believe that you have no relatives of the holocausts or any family members who have lived under a communist regime to have shared stories with you. Millions and millions of people have been killed and tortured under communism. Millions are being starved to death even today in the hellhole called North Korea. How many thousands disappear every year in China for daring to speak out against communism? To advocate single payer healthcare is to advocate top down centralized bureacracy, the basic foothold of all communist societies.
ReplyDeleteYou can say you are giving money to the people as they see fit to use but then the costs of healthcare will inflate as doctors and hospitals find it easier to charge what they want to the weakest and most desperate in society. This in turn will fuel calls to the lawmakers for price controls, regulations to protect the innocent from the unscrupulous. Only the lobbyists will make sure to insert lots of goodies into these laws that get passed. As the money is given by the government, the government can demand control over how it is spent and how much is spent, who gets more because they pay lobbyists more to get them more.
Can't you see this is how the system has gotten us in trouble in the first place? It is why big government never exists in the same form for long without turning into something terrible, controlling and eventually murderous. People give up their freedoms slowly for more security until one day they wake up and ALL their freedoms are gone. To think a government slowly increasing its power and reach over the citizens is a benign, good thing is very naive. There were plenty of ways, laid out by the tea party by the way, to fix the system without more government. Tie insurance plans to the individual and not to the employer. If I find a plan I like that's affordable, I should be able to take it with me when i switch jobs. It's also better for the economy to allow people who may have sick family members the flexibility of finding a new, better job without losing their health care. Open the plans up across state lines. Let insurers compete for their business. As thousands upon thousands of examples can always present you with the facts that competition improves the quality of what you buy while at the same time lowering the price. Every problem the government looks at, they need to look at from the lens of icnreasing individual freedom and competition. Let the market solve as many problems as it can on its own without increasing the size and scope of government.
Has any politician looked at ANYTHING in our country over the long haul from this lens? Government gets bigger every year, spending more out of control, more laws, more regulations.....NEVER less. That is where the tea party came from. As an active member, I have been to the rallies. We are not Republican zombie plants. We see what is going wrong in our country and much of it stems from the fact that any efficient organization needs to sometimes reorganize, cut their budget and inefficiencies. Instead we are getting the exact opposite. I will fight Obamacare with every breath. It is bad for the country and leading us faster into bankruptcy as the corrupt CBO now admits. Funny how every entitlement program we've ever passed gets a glowing gold star on budgetary reform from the CBO only to vastly veer into the red within 5-10 years of being implemented.