So, I’ve been listening to this health care debate forever now. It’s been a topic of personal involvement for me more or less since I joined the workforce because of how it has affected my life. I’m fortunate to have avoided any serious injury or illness since I was a young boy – and it’s probably a good thing because I generally haven’t been able to afford more than the more basic hospitalization coverage that my various employers have (or have not) offered me.
And I say "have not" because my first steady job was working as a contracted technician, through an employment firm, for a large electronics company that may or may not rhyme with "Bony". We worked nine hour shifts (which included our lunch), the job itself was both mind numbing and infuriating, and our seven person staff had a turnover rate of about one person a month for the year and a half I was there – a record, by the way.
And because we were technically contracted employees (who had name badges and domain accounts and parking access and everything else) we received no benefits from Bony at all. All of our benefits came through our contracting company (who, I found out towards the end of my employment with them, were taking roughly two thirds of every dollar they got from Bony for my services). The health care that was offered to us through the contracting company was so expensive and so lackluster that it was actually cheaper and more efficient for me to secure my own private – and extremely basic – policy.
I generally referred to that setup as "getting screwed". The irony is that, compared to most of the people that I talk to who are just entering the workforce now, I had a pretty sweet deal in terms of health insurance. And that to me is a problem. To be honest, I was very fortunate that I never really needed my insurance beyond a few doctor’s visits for common infections and the like. I never had a medicine or a procedure denied to me as a cost saving technique. So if I feel that the insurance industry has serious problems, I can’t even imagine the opinions of people that really have been screwed by the system.
Now I’m not going to go into some tirade about single payer systems or public options or further privatization or anything like that. To be honest, I’m out of my depth. And as hot a topic as these things are in political discourse right now, you don’t need to hear a moldy re-hash of it all from me. Having listened to all of the arguments, I’m personally in favor of a public option. It addresses the greatest number of problems and causes the least amount of unpleasant disruption. Not everyone agrees of course. And there is a whole list of talking points being used to refute a public option for health care. There are two, specifically, that I take issue with. And let’s ignore any fallacies, half-truths and lies here. Let’s just assume for a moment that the following two statements are true.
- A government-run health care option would be cumbersome and oppressive. It would deny people their own voice in determining their health care decisions, and would be akin to the boondoggle horror that is socialized medicine.
- A government-run health care system would put private health care companies out of business because they wouldn’t be able to compete or retain their customers if public health care was available to everyone.
What I’ve just been told by the very people that want to keep the health insurance industry the way it is now this: A shitty, inefficient, last-rate service health care option would still manage to put privately run HMOs out of business. Well how piss-poor a job must the industry be doing right now if The Horrors Of Socialized Medicine could still send them reeling into the poorhouse? Their argument for making no significant change is that the status quo is so beyond the pale terrible that even a government funded option, which they tell us is the worst health care in the world, would still be better by comparison.
In a few months, these same people are going to sit around wondering how in the hell they lost this argument.