Watching Congress act to reform health care is akin to watching the grass grow. It is boring, sleep-inducing and is a perfect anesthetic for any vital thought process or discourse on the subject. If you want to kill an idea, send it to our congressional dodderers in Washington. We need a new dynamic in Washington and President Barack Obama has certainly proved to me that it still does not exist, despite his rhetoric. The politicians have deliberately kicked the public option to death.
Consider the people in Congress who drivel their thoughts on this vital need for society. They are politicians who have taken political contributions for decades from pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, the American Medical Association, hospitals and their associations. These poisonous influences are intent on destroying the public health care option. Our own Olympia Snowe wants a public health care option to be triggered a decade from now only if the insurance industry we are acquainted with fails to achieve nebulous savings targets.
Sen. Snowe’s contributors include some of all of the above poisonous influences. Only the employees of these entities — pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, American Medical Association, hospitals and their associations — trust their motives and intents. Now these entities are weighing in with expensive ads, opposing the public option on the grounds of excessive debt and excessive cost and lack of due process. They seem to forget that the present state of affairs has plunged families into excessive debt and excessive cost for treatment. This sorry state of affairs is based on a fee-for-service payment structure coupled with an inexhaustible hunger for profit.
Who in his right mind wants to wait another decade before a public health care option exists that will certainly put the present insurance industry to the test on a cost versus benefits basis? Who in his right mind trusts a profit-seeking industry that already poisons the debate in Congress with its lobbyists, with their sophistries that scare away many ill-informed people from reform by accusing health care reform of including “death panels” and the like? Even if a government panel existed or tried to talk me into early euthanasia, I would probably tell it where to go.
So, who cares what any panel wants, anyway? I live, I breathe, I will my own will. What well-read and well-educated individual can possibly give these lobbies credit for truth telling when every scrap of common sense tells you that the status quo has suited them well for so many decades before? These decades have seen very substantial increases in premiums, costs of care and promises of more of the same to come. Neither these costs nor these inefficiencies can be allowed to snowball, while obscene profits by these parties trump health care reform.
Part of the problem is our career politicians who are forever gathering political contributions and who never avoid the influences of these self-interested groups. Have these elected creatures the right to poison the wellspring of a public option that could give more than mere hope to the indigent, the near poor who have significant health needs? To a Congress moribund with corruption of the will to act and the intention to act in the best interests of the people, I say lead, follow or get the hell out of the way. We can always replace these creatures with folks who have an incentive to act for the will of the people. One weapon is to recall any politician who refutes the will of the people, even if he or she is a senator.
In my opinion, our elected officials are more an impediment than an aid to Mr. Obama’s best instincts. I elected him to be my president, and his own party is obstructing quick and intelligent action. It is not nuclear theory, it’s just common sense to remove the pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, American Medical Association, hospitals and their associations from any part of this debate. Their input cannot be trusted when it includes their purchasing of the congressional course of action. Their anti-social actions endanger the health of the American people.
Fred Mendel of Sherman is a retired general accountant.