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fullygoldy) wrote2007-01-25 12:09 pm
Health Care Reform
We listened to the state of the union address on Tuesday, and while I did pay fairly close attention to the health care bits, I just couldn't summon the interest to actively listen to the whole thing. DH seemed to be doing a much better job of following along.
So, the Republicans want to give us a tax credit for health insurance. The way I understand it, this is just an across-the-board flat credit to be issued to everyone based on the size of their household or their filing status. You don't have to actually be paying insurance premiums to receive the credit, but the credit should make it easier to pay any premiums you sign up for. There's other stuff to - the fed could promote universal health care in the states by giving them more money to run those kinds of programs, but that's sort of a trickle-down theory and I haven't thought about it much. I have thought about the tax credit though, and honestly, I don't think much of it.
1) People who are already struggling to make ends meet will spend the freed-up cash on day-to-day necessities. Their daily lives will be marginally improved, but they still won't have found or procured affordable health insurance.
2) Insurance companies will greet the tax credit/individual budget increases with higher premiums. If people can afford to pay more for their insurance, the price will grow until even less people than before can afford coverage. The "credit" to citizens will in effect become a "subsidy" to insurance corporations. After all, the gas companies have been subsidized all this time, and now that their subsidy has been exposed, the health insurance companies will want theirs too.
This tax credit is not going to fix a broken system. The parts that need fixing outside of the control of the man-on-the-street. The feds need to impress upon the insurance providers that their practices are not beneficial to the insureds. Our health cannot be safeguarded in the free-market economy. The really sad thing is that right after the speech, I was heartened by the fact that the issue had been addressed at all, and that it sounded like someone had actually made an effort to come up with a reform of some kind. But the more I thought about it, the more dis-heartened I'm actually feeling.
Good grief! The ideas that keep coming out of Washington are less than useless.
Our society is so freaking connected now - there is no reason not to actually reach out and get the citizens involved in the process. This is different than the grass-roots efforts of independent organizations like MoveOn.org. Those organizations have to make themselves too similar to the ones they are fighting to attempt to get anything done. They're valuable right now, because we're feeling that they are the only avenue we have for being heard any more, but what if all they really had to do was review new ideas and proposals and make their opinions/recommendations available to us? Then we could review the competing recommendations and weigh-in via internet or telephone polls that would actually carry weight with our whole congress, not just our representatives. Having reps is a good thing, but they're the only ones we have any kind of access to. What if my rep doesn't like a proposal I like? What if he likes something that the majority of his constituency agrees with, but the majority of the country doesn't? What if I want another rep to know how I feel? We say we send people up there to vote their conscience, but the ones we've got don't seem very interested in representing us or in being conscientious - they all seem like they just want to be re-elected. If everyone could weigh in on the major stuff, then our reps would also be more informed as to what their constituents really want. And maybe we'd also get to reform the whole representation process. Because it seems to me that the type of person this government was designed to be run by is the last person that is actually going to bother running for office these days. Our founding fathers trusted that representatives would be conscientious citizens who cared about the country, the government and their fellow citizens before themselves. And for a long time, their trust was well-placed. But in my lifetime I've seen very few representatives that I believe matched that description or expectation. And I believe the ones who do match it are shoved out and trampled as early as possible by the self-interested politicians so that our choices are limited to bad and worse, with no hope for real improvement or reform.
There has got to be a way to bring the power, reach and promise of the information highway into play here. It's become a huge commercial (commerce) success, but it was designed to be informative. The information should be able to travel both ways, and be readily discernible. What if we had a national listening database? Everyone sends their ideas, like ideas get grouped together, discussion and refining occur, and what finally shakes out is something worthwhile for congress to take up and consider. Since it came from us, they'll know where we stand on it. There is nothing to stop them from putting their pet ideas out there too - the whole point is to increase involvement with the governing process and increase ownership of the government so that we don't have to listen to any more bad ideas and console ourselves with "at least they're thinking about it" ever again.