Southern Californian Blue Dogs Jane Harman(D, CA-36, Venice, near Los Angeles) and Loretta Sanchez(D, CA-47,Anaheim, Orange County) are breaking with their Blue Dog coalition, and co authored a piece in the Huffington Post this afternoon, announcing their support of the Public Option in the upcoming health insurance reform bill. The timing could not be better, as the Senate Finance Committee today voted their version of the bill out of committee without it.
Harman and Sanchez make a compelling case for the Public Option here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... As their forclosure- battered state stands with its back to the wall, its latest budget already running in the red again after the first quarter of its fiscal year, inspite of tremendous cuts and gimmicks, with Governor Schwarzenegger saying he supported the "goals of reform" while vetoing half the bills the legislature passed in a snit over a water bill, maybe the California Contingent of Ladies in the Legislature is finally coming to its senses- California Can't Wait Anymore.
From Representatives Harmon and Sanchez's piece:
Far from being an option of last resort or a government-funded takeover of the country's health care system, we see the public option as a critical market mechanism that will drive down costs, foster competition and expand Americans' insurance choices.
This is not just smart health care policy, it is smart economic policy.
A Gallup-Healthways survey has identified more than 290,000 uninsured people in our congressional districts alone. This is astonishing, and, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, their medical care cost local hospitals and other health care providers $65 million last year.
When I divided that, it came to $224 dollars per uninsured person. Remember most people don't go to the hospital at all in any year, except as as an emergency. Point being, the medical bills are out there, and they're not going away whether or not we devise a system to plan for them. Harman and Sanchez correctly point out that we who already have health insurance already are paying for the costs of these patients thru paying higher premiums to cover the higher costs hospitals charge to money sources they know might be made to pay, at least $500 per year. This is what all the naysayers miss and the insurance companies hope you will, too. What they don't mention is that the people who can't pay but must obtain some form of medical care to live, are then thrust into an endless cycle of medical debt.
Harman and Sanchez also cite a Treasury Department report that the President also has used to bolster the need for reform: http://www.businessweek.com/... that shows that almost half of all of us who are not old enough to be on that government funded Medicare will lose our health insurance at some time during the next 10 years. (Note- don't click on the "Treasury Dept" link in the Huffpo, which only takes you to the Sacramento Bee tag page, which is subscription, click on the businessweek write up I just linked, and quoted below, or go to the pdf googledocument from the Treasury here: http://docs.google.com/...
From BusinessWeek:
Money & Politics
Obama, Treasury Study Say Losing Healthcare Is Common
Posted by: Theo Francis on September 12
But that's where one of the Treasury's most surprising figures comes in: The study estimates that 41% of Americans went without coverage for at least six months during the decade.
In other words, few people went without health insurance for just a month or two. Indeed, the Treasury study concluded that most went without insurance for at least a 12 months, and half went without coverage for 2-1/2 years or longer, though not necessarily consecutively. (In other words, the median time without insurance was 2-1/2 years.)
Let's do the arithmetic: the American population stood at about 298 million in mid-2006, so half of 48% suggests that some 70 million people went without health insurance for at least 2-1/2 years from 1997 through 2006.
From that Treasury document, we also see the following for "Non Elderly Americans"
• 53 percent of Americans in Rural Areas go without insurance over a 10 year span- a larger fraction than in the nation as a whole
• 45 percent of Americans with household incomes between $50,000 - $100,000 (ten year average) go without insurance at some point over a ten year span- thus, the experience of going without insurance is not limited to poor or moderate income families but touches a significant number of people who are securely in the middle class.
Harman and Sanchez are both looking at the economic future of their state, not to mention potential primary challenges for voting against a domestic issue that can no longer be ignored, and have decided to go Aqua Dog on their allegiance with the conservative, Democratic Blue Dog Caucus, which has been a major, passive- agressive opponent of insurance reform- if it happens, it won't be their doing nor their fault. Along with Senator Dianne Feinstein's coming out in support of the Public Option last week, this signifies either the bill really is going to be passed with some sort of Public Option after all, or that at least they don't want to be marked down in the history books as being on the wrong side of coaxing the nation towards a humane version of health care coverage, instead of something that resembles a lottery ticket purchase to the ER, with the surviving winners making it to Medicare coverage.
As I have not hesitated, to some people's protests, to point out that the Blue Dog Caucus members have been taking PAC money from the same Oil company (like Koch Industries), Coal, DOD contractors, Tobacco, and Pharma interests as the Republicans and their astroturfing Tea Party "Patriots" teabagger protest groups, which targeted many Democratic Town Hall meetings with constituents this past August, this is an interesting development. Must have been sort of the ultimate "I know what you did last summer" back at the congressional cafeteria.