Good and bad reasons to oppose current healthcare legislation
Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, a medical school professor, wrote an article for the Huffington post today, critiquing the arguments of those opposed to healthcare reform. He points out that there are legitimate reasons to oppose current legislation:
There are lots of legitimate reasons to dislike the current bills being considered as health care reform. For instance, the best of them considers universal coverage to mean that more than 12 million people are still left without health insurance. None of the bills do much to contain costs, meaning that health care costs may still rise faster than inflation and consume even more of our GDP. Too few people are likely to be able to access many of the benefits of reform, such as the insurance exchange.
Reform as currently prescribed does not fully decouple insurance from employment. Out of pocket costs are still too high for many Americans. And itβs unclear whether even the regulations contained within will be able to curb the worst practices of the private insurance industry.
However, he also points out that the current talking points for the Republican opposition to healthcare reform are out of touch with reality and lack perspective. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said of the current House bill, “This is not affordable… what this is going to do is bankrupt America.” Carroll responds to this by pointing out the current proposal is deficit reducing.
He also compares numbers β showing that current proposals put the cost of healthcare reform at $900 billion over 10 years ($90 billion per year) β this compared to $470 billion a year for Medicare, $515 billion for Social Security, and $680 billion in defense (not including the two wars). Additionally, about $1.5 trillion in tax money went to healthcare costs last year.
Carrol concludes:
People are saying that of all of these things, health care reform is going to break the bank. No. Health care costs are what might bankrupt us, and I am all in favor of reducing those, but railing against the cost of reform while ignoring all the rest is willful ignorance.
And, in my humble opinion, this is (or at least should be) the aim of healthcare reform β making healthcare affordable to everyone, including taxpayers. There are many good reasons to oppose the current reform push, but there are also many uninformed ones.
Posted by Stohn at 10:45 AM 0 comments Links to this post