A better health care plan — what else?

The current, largely Republican-inspired brouhaha over the Affordable Care Act makes the best possible case for universal care, but few if any are connecting the dots — at least not out loud. Each time Republicans vow to overturn the ACA, Democrats charge that the GOP doesn’t have a better plan, and Republicans are silent. Why? It’s not because they don’t think there’s a better plan — it’s because the better plan would be an anathema to them.

The better plan, of course, is universal health insurance, single payer, expanded Medicare, whatever you want to call it. The better plan covers everyone for everything at an affordable price determined by a sliding scale, with rates for families calculated in the same way. The better plan would issue every American the same card, which would give every American the same access to the same benefits regardless of social status. The better plan would be non-profit and leave insurance companies out of the picture altogether. The better plan would encourage the establishment of more clinics modeled after the Mayo, Cleveland, and even the VA. The better plan would allow vets to find health care wherever they chose — including VA medical centers if they wished. The better plan would cover the well and the sick, and provide the kind of peace of mind never before experienced in this country.

The industrialized world has had one form or another of a better plan for decades. Only the United States holds out. In most of the world’s democracies, health care is a right. In the US, it’s seen as a privilege. You can be healthy if you’re well off. If not, well too bad. You can be financially secure if you’re well off. If not, well you can go bankrupt.

As long as insurance companies have so much power over our elected officials, we will never enjoy a better plan in the US — and as long as both sides continue to take big money from corporations, we can’t pin the blame on just one party.

Forget about insurance reform

Obamacare is being clobbered in the polls, which is interesting because it’ll be a few months yet before Obamacare is fully in force. It shouldn’t come as a surprise though, because conservatives have poured a lot of money into a smear campaign to persuade people they don’t like it.

If Obamacare fails, it will be because conservatives of both parties controlled the process to design the plan — and progressives let them get away with it. The end result was a plan doomed to self-destruct before it even got off the ground — and the instruments of that destruction were employers and private insurers.

Employers are not known for willingly doing right by their employees, so in general they will pay as little as they can get away with and offer as few benefits as possible. It’s a common practice for many companies to schedule workers less than 40 hours a week just so they won’t be considered full-time — and as a rule part-time employees are not eligible for such perks as paid vacations and insurance. If Obamacare mandates that employees working 30 or more hours a week would be eligible for insurance, it’s a simple thing for employers to limit their workers to 29. Now who didn’t see this coming?

Employer-based insurance is stupid to begin with, so employers would have rejoiced if they didn’t have to be involved at all. Private insurers, on the other hand, hated the idea of being left out. After all, these companies exist for one reason only — to make money. Helping people cuts into profits, so they will avoid helping whenever possible, as long as the law allows.

It would be delusional to think that those governing the United States would see the light and decide to craft a universal single-payer insurance system anytime soon, but a public option would have begun to pave the way. But when a public option was left out of the discussion about an Affordable Care Act, the message was clear: don’t get your hopes up about reform.