Let's get the facts straight on health care reform

With the debate over health care reform getting hot and heavy, opponents of President Barack Obama’s proposal have been feeding the public a lot of misinformation. Unfortunately, one of my Examiner colleagues has joined them.

In an April 12 post, Watchdog Politics Examiner Martha Gore falsely characterized Obama's health care reform proposal as a “nationalized health care plan,” and Media Matters for America rightly took her to task for misinforming the public.

Let’s get our terminology straight. Nationalized or socialized medicine is a health care system that is publicly financed and delivered, such as Great Britain’s National Health Service. That is not part of Obama’s proposal or the Single Payer plan put forward in HR 676 and S 703.

The public health insurance option in Obama’s proposal and Single Payer both provide for health care that is public financed and privately delivered. In effect, both would extend Medicare beyond the elderly, with everyone covered under Single Payer or having an opportunity to choose such a plan under Obama’s proposal.

While Single Payer would automatically cover everyone, the Obama option would give consumers a lower-cost alternative to private insurance. Since the overhead for private insurance averages 30 percent, compared to only 4 percent for Medicare, such competition could force private insurers to become more responsive to consumer needs.

It should also be noted that under both Single Payer and the Obama proposal, patients have a free choice of doctors, while private insurance limits those covered to doctors within each insurer’s system. It can sometimes be difficult to build a doctor-patient relationship under such an arrangement, as I personally found when I twice had to change primary care physicians when they stopped taking my insurance.

By putting profits ahead of everything else, the insurance companies are the primary cause of our broken health care system, and they are now fighting tooth and nail to maintain their racket. Their fear is that they can’t compete profitably with the cheaper public insurance alternative proposed by Obama, leading many businesses to switch to it for employee health insurance. Under this scenario, the public alternative would likely evolve into Single Payer.

Opponents of the Obama proposal also claim that it would undermine consumer choice in health care, but this argument is absurd. When health insurance is provided by the employer, as is now the case, there is usually no choice for the employee. They are stuck with whatever deal their employer can get, complete with co-pays, deductibles and exclusions that limit coverage.

Details on the Obama proposal are currently being worked on, and it is expected to be introduced in Congress in June. We can look forward to a fierce debate, but don’t expect honesty from the opposition.

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