The details of the big health-care reform legislation are beginning to come out. There really isn’t a firm proposal yet. It’s just a lot of competing ideas getting stirred around in the muck of Congress. But the general framework is out there now.
Under the proposed reform, the Kenyan-born Obama will personally kill your granny, harvest the organs from your unborn children, and force us all into FEMA reeducation camps where we will be forcibly vaccinated against swine flu. As a result of the flu shots, we will all be sedated, allowing Obama to seize our guns and ATVs. We will all be forced to drive gay electric cars. Access to health care will be rationed, and not every hangnail will qualify for a CAT scan.
It sounds kind of draconian, but frankly, it’s still a substantial improvement over what a lot of us have now. What worries me is that Obama apparently made a pact with the devil, I mean the pharmaceutical industry, to enable it to continue price gouging. I’m not hearing anything that suggests that the CEOs of the private insurance companies will be living under a bridge. That has become my measure of success – if the heads of Blue Cross and Pfizer are job-sharing a position as a cart boy at Walmart, there has been meaningful reform.
The issues are complicated and important enough that it would really be nice to have a rational discussion about it. Most other countries with a standard of living similar to ours have figured out a variety of ways to provide quality health care to almost all of their populations. We spend more, get less, and leave a wide swath of our population uninsured or seriously underinsured.
The Republicans cling to the myth that there is a competitive private market that will solve everything. In reality, there is no competition. In Utah we are lucky to have a duopoly instead of a monopoly in the health insurance business. We have the choice to have our preexisting conditions rejected by either Blue Cross or IHC. If you are over 50 and ever have had the hiccups, neither company wants to talk to you. A whole lot of the problem could be solved by prohibiting insurers from denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and maybe breaking up the market dominance so there really was competition. That’s where the bare-bones public option comes in.
But instead of a thoughtful discussion of health insurance, government’s appropriate role, tort reform, and how to cut costs, we have an irrational screaming match. It’s well documented that groups with funding from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are helping stir the pot. There are “rent-a-mob” demonstrations at congressional town hall meetings. But the “rent-a-mob” folks would be laughed out of the room if their outlandish claims of “death panels” didn’t resonate with a lot of people. Apparently a significant portion of the population really believes that the government wants to off their grandmothers.
Obama held a town hall in New Hampshire this week. A man standing outside with a pistol strapped to his thigh was carrying a sign that said, “It’s time to water the tree of liberty.” The guy was interviewed on the news and said of course the gun was loaded. It would be pretty silly to carry around an unloaded firearm, wouldn’t it?
The Republicans in Congress have made it pretty clear that they don’t care about solving legitimate national problems. They only care about making sure the Democrats don’t succeed. Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina said they needed to stop health care because it would be Obama’s Waterloo. Preventing Obama from succeeding is the goal. Improving access to health care for average Americans-who cares. Apparently they have nothing productive to add to the conversation, so they are feeding hysteria.
It’s really kind of alarming to see near-riots developing over the possibility of a public-option health-insurance program. I frankly don’t think that is the root of the angst. Unemployment is close to 10 percent, and that figure doesn’t include people who are employed at half of what they used to earn. People on the lower end of the ladder have every reason to be frightened. Nothing seems to work. Factories are not just closed but torn down. Foreclosures are rampant, credit limits are maxed out. Meanwhile, the banks are making big money again, which may be a good thing in the long run, but has to stick in the craw of somebody who is facing bankruptcy.
The people in Congress take August off because they are so efficient they get all their work done early. It would be a great moment in American politics if they come back from this hysteria-filled recess committed to actually solving some problems.
But just in case, I’m buying Granny a new assault rifle.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.