Published Sept. 3, 2006 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
By Aaron J. Brown
Recently President Bush “unveiled” a new health care plan for the nation. He stressed that his idea would provide every American the choice to buy into the kind of health care plan that would fit their lives best. I use the annoying device of putting “unveiled” in quotations because this is sort of like “unveiling” my six-year-old family sedan and telling me I won a new car.
A new car! Boy, it sure looks familiar.
President Bush likes to do this sort of thing. He led voters to believe he was going to invest in community and technical colleges during the last election before turning a budget that provided a net cut in grants for job retraining. Then he cut federal student aid grants too. But he did get pretty pictures and flowery phrases during a news cycle in the heat of the campaign.
Now, because of term limits, the president doesn’t have to worry about elections any more. His Republican party has held all branches of government for six years, which hasn’t happened since Reconstruction and dawn of the industrial age and before that when they were Whigs. Whigs! So these folks should be able to do whatever they want to fix our nation’s problems.
Here’s a big problem for them. Millions of people don’t have health insurance and can’t go to the doctor for preventative care. They could probably go if they felt sick or had an emergency, but only after terrific paperwork, hassle and paying more than their budget allows.
So, appropriately, President Bush announced his plan two weeks ago. The plan: provide choice, so that all Americans can choose the health plan that fits their lives. The plan includes token measures to make some plans more affordable for the currently uninsured, but no measures to guarantee care to all Americans. And, as always, it continues the policy of providing the best care to the wealthiest and the worst care to the poorest.
I’m not preaching class warfare here. I’m OK with rich people having exclusive access to mansions, private golf courses, fancy toys, more attractive spouses and extramarital lovers, opera house naming rights, nice clothes and the belief that school lunch programs promote laziness. I don’t like it, but that’s the way it goes. I’m not OK with including basic health care in that list. If you feel a lump in your body that might be cancer, your annual income should never, ever be a factor in the battle that lies ahead.
I’ve called for universal health care before and, if you put it on a referendum, I’d vote for higher taxes to pay for it. It might be higher taxes, but it’d be less total money out of our pockets when you remove what the average American pays in health care premiums. It’d also be great for business. The fastest growing and least controllable cost facing big and small companies (and government, for that matter) is employee and retiree health insurance. It’s literally bogging down our economic growth. If our economy slows, halts or falters, many companies, cities and school districts face economic ruin. A modified single-payer system like what you see in many European countries would work, but so would a wide variety of public-private partnerships I’ve seen proposed. We’d have to grandfather in the whole thing, but we phased in civil rights and that worked. The ideas are plentiful; we just need some guts at the top.
Dressing up a pig in a prom dress and calling it reform is well past my tolerance level. The so-called “choice” problem for many Americans isn’t just that they are blocked from going to the doctor or plan they want; it’s that they can’t go to a doctor AT ALL. We can fix it –Republicans and Democrats – we just have to put people ahead of the insurance industry.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.