I've been here for a long while. Under my previous pseudonym, "Snakes on a White House," I witnessed the first round of pie fights. Now we are dealing with a new, far more savage round of pie fights. These pies that are being hurled in this inning contain ROCKS. And we are being injured.
More under the flip.
I know I had a period where I was saying "Kill Bill." I'm not so sure I want to now. Yeah, it's a mess, and it's riddled with giveaways to the insurance industry, and it might or might not help me. But I have come to believe that at least it is a start in the direction we want to go, and it will be tinkered with again and again until we have something that might resemble something workable.
However, the REAL action in HCR won't be on a national level. Canadian HCR wasn't a national thing until the very end, when every single blessed Canadian province had passed its own Single Payer initiative. Basically what Canada has is multiple Single Payers. And it works so well it's a sacred cow that even the most hardened Canadian conservative will dare not touch.
I have basically decided to throw up my hands and say "enough" with regard to any sort of discussion of a national plan. Kill it or cure it, I'm not interested in it anymore. The real action is going to happen in the States. And the place where it will happen first is California. Yes, in California. In spite of the big mess our government is in, we will somehow pull through and somehow make this work. Because the California OneCare bill, SB810, will solve many of the systemic problems giving us fits now. It won't solve our problems with the Prison Industrial Complex. But it will help us rein in health care entitlements, namely the State of California's share of MedicAid, what we call MediCal.
Right now, MediCal serves the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens. Medicare, funded from national trust funds, also cares for a largely poor and vulnerable pool of people. S-CHIP serves poor and lower middle class children, who are actually some of the most robust citizens we can have, actuarily speaking, in a pool of insured. The rest of our citizenry are either covered by private insurance at work, or by nothing at all. These are the people we really WANT in an insurance pool. They are healthy and robust and will be so for a while.
Suppose, instead of a multitude of private pools, these people not covered by MediCal, Medicare and S-CHIP instead were put in the same pool as everyone else. Instead of the cost-sharing system where an employer pays for some and the employee pays for the rest, we all get money taken out of our paycheck for one big pool with healthy people as well as sick people. That money pays premiums for one big insurance pool. Everybody in. Nobody out. The money taken out will likely be LESS than your share of private health insurance. The eighth-largest economy in the world will be a huge pool to spread risk and lower costs.
And this is not "socialized medicine." Nope. What the United Kingdom has in its National Health Service is "socialized medicine." Her Majesty's Government owns all the hospitals, most of the clinics, and employs most of the doctors, nurses, and allied health care personnel. This is NOT what OneCare is about. The closest thing to the UK NHS we have here in California is Kaiser.
No, this is "social insurance." Just like All-American, Mom and Apple Pie solutions like Medicare, Social Security and so on. Instead of little pools run by private companies, we have one big pool that everyone pays into. The hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, the allied health people...that all remains in a private, either for-profit or non-profit series of systems. However, they all will be paid from one pot of money that everyone contributes to.
Will this be good for business? HELL YEAH! Toyota is now concentrating its North American manufacturing strategy on its plants in Canada because paying for private insurance is such a drain on their bottom line. One of the reasons why film production runs away from California to places like Vancouver and Toronto is that "fringes" (mandated benefits required by unions) are a lot less expensive. And the current system is a "pay me now or pay me later" kind of thing. You pay more and more money to private insurers AND pay taxes to cover reimbursals for unpaid indigent care. We all pay for the uninsured. The burden falls on the taxpayer. If everyone was in one big pool, this would no longer be a problem.
There are other expenses people don't think of associated with our broken health care system. There is the medical part of car insurance, where we have to at least cover the medical liabilities of those we injure in a wreck. There is worker's compensation, a lot of which has to do with medical liabilities. If we had OneCare, those costs would suddenly shrink. Car insurance would no longer need to cover injuries, but would cover only property damage. Same with worker's compensation. You would still have to deal with a person being disabled and unable to work, but at least their medical expenses would be covered. And that's a huge part of worker's comp.
Pass OneCare, and you give California a huge shot in the arm financially. THIS IS STIMULUS. If employers were no longer burdened with health insurance costs, they'd hire more people and be more able to afford expansion. They would have a healthier and more able populace to go to work for them, a populace that is more productive than one that has to worry about where their health care is coming from.
And people wouldn't be locked to their jobs. A hundred, no, a hundred thousand flowers would bloom from garages and small storefronts, as people are freed to be entrepreneurs. Who knows, the next Jobs and Wozniak might now be toiling at a corporate cage, locked to their jobs, unable to follow their entrepreneurial instincts. Sever the fetters of "job lock," and who knows what might happen next!
These internecine fights do not interest me anymore. I'm taking myself out of the pie fight over the national plan. It is irrelevant, ultimately, to solving the riddle of access to and cost of health care. What is relevant is getting us all fired up and ready to fight for OneCare -- Full care, for all, for less, for everyone -- in our respective states. Who's with me?
Find out about the California struggle for real Health Care Reform at http://www.californiaonecare.org/