August 30, 2009
Health insurance reform will benefit people, not companies
Robert McElvaine
Special to The Clarion-Ledger
Health insurance reform is about you. It's for your benefit.
The usual suspects have rounded themselves up to throw shovelfuls of manure in order to protect the inflated profits of private insurance companies. They want us to think that reform is intended to help "them" (a.k.a. "the least of these"). Let's identify them. It's not the poor; they already receive Medicaid. The uninsured are principally the hard-working lower middle class. You and I are just a lost job or a serious illness away from being part of them.
Here are the main goals of the president's proposal:
With which of these goals do you disagree?
The opponents are right when they say we don't want some bureaucrat between us and our doctors. What they fail to say is that we currently have between us and our doctor private insurance company bureaucrats, whose purpose is to deny as much care as they can get away with, so as to maximize profits. One of the goals of health insurance reform is to remove those company bureaucrats from making decisions and return them to our doctors and ourselves.
So, put aside all the misinformation you have been hearing in recent weeks. There are no "death panels." There never were.
Right-wing pundits and politicians have gleefully encouraged people to think that proposed health insurance reform legislation will lead to euthanasia for elderly Americans. The AARP calls these claims "flat-out lies" and states unequivocally: "There is no provision of any piece of legislation that would promote euthanasia of any kind."
Of course, genuine issues about health insurance should be debated. People have real ideological differences. But most of the things being said by opponents of reform are not differences of opinion; they are lies. They are not ideology; they are "liedeology."
For all the lies, the real question is simply this:
Is the purpose of health insurance to provide healthcare and financial protection to people who are stricken by illness, or is it to maximize profits for insurance companies?
The people bringing us the lies about health reform and the disrupters of meetings are the same people who brought us the economic collapse.
One of the groups stimulating the mob actions at town hall forums, "Conservatives for Patients' Rights," is led by a man who previously headed a for-profit hospital chain that was fined $1.7 billion for overcharge fraud. A more accurate name for the group would be "Flacks for Insurance Companies' Right to Wrong Patients."
Screaming people preventing others from talking is not democracy; it is subversion of democracy. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to prevent others from speaking by shouting them down. Those who will not let others speak thereby indicate that they do not think they could prevail in an open and civil debate.
There are two sides in the health insurance reform debate: The private insurance companies, multinational drug companies, and for-profit hospitals are on one side, supported by politically motivated enemies of the president, talk radio and "Faux News." If you think that is the typical American citizen's side, God bless you.
The "freedom" these interests seek to protect is the freedom of insurance companies to deny coverage to people likely to become ill and to dump those who do. They seek to maintain the freedom of the rest of us to live in constant fear of falling ill and going bankrupt because of an illness.
On the other side are the American people. Health insurance reform is for us - all of us, except the few who are enriching themselves off the misfortunes and insecurity of others.
Are we going to allow ourselves to be hoodwinked yet again? That is what the debate over health insurance reform comes down to.