Tag Archives: health insurance

Medicare for all

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Medicare for all

–Or at least for more. As this writer has noted more than once, the way to get young and healthy people into general coverage is to expand Medicare to cover everyone up to age 26. Why not? What would be the argument against? –This is the cohort least liable to the ills of old age, after all; least liable to need long-term care, to decline into Alzheimer’s dementia, least liable to be diagnosed with colon cancer or breast cancer or pancreatic cancer, least prone to heart disease or strokes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Et cetera.

Not that youth doesn’t have its problems, where health and survival are concerned. As previously written, a host of ills awaits to tackle healthy young people–alcohol and other substance abuse, eating disorders including over-eating and the reverse, aggression and guns, dangerous/reckless driving, pointless accidents, dangerous sports and games, and of course war, among others. Every thinking parent is well aware of the possibilities.

But all these, we can tackle. To some extent, the attempts have already begun, with some effect.

Even with all the problems, a large population awaits better wellness and better coverage, with the fiscal pay-off of lowering health care costs partly by spreading the risk far wider. Let’s hope it happens some time.

This comes to mind today, of course, because the cable channels were–just a few minutes ago–all agog with certainty that the Supreme Court would announce a ruling on health care today. Thank God for C-Span, also covering the issue, which instead of inflicting more political prognosticators on a long-suffering public, showed the activists–all sides–demonstrating and speaking in front of the Supreme Court building.

Supreme Court building, Washington, D.C.

Two Supreme Court rulings were announced today: Ms. Justice Kagan read the court’s opinion, on a five-to-four decision, against life without parole for juveniles; and Mr. Justice Kennedy read the court’s opinion, Kagan abstaining, invalidating much of Arizona’s sweeping Latino-profiling law (Arizona v. United States).

Sheriff Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona

Meanwhile, the Dow plunged in early trading this morning. Looks as though the stock market was less gleeful, or perhaps spiteful, over speculation that ‘Obamacare’ would be struck down than were many of the cable commentators. Most of them are just chafing in resentment over their misreading of the public anyway. It is still remarkable that the Washington Post, among other periodicals, went thirty years without reporting insurance abuses.

And speaking of resentment, we still hear wofully little about public reaction to the insurance companies. Many, many commentators have harped on Tea Party anger over the individual mandate. Few, very few, commentators have pointed out that that anger does not speak well for the insurance industry.

Aside from undertakers and mortuaries, is there any industry in America that has more reluctant customers than the insurance industry?

How flood plains work

We also still hear little genuine reporting on flood insurance as a massive transfer of wealth. But then, the officeholders most vehemently denying climate change or most eagerly avoiding it as a topic are the same people, by and large, most in the pay of the insurance industry.

 

 

 

Health insurance is not broccoli

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Health insurance is not broccoli

Listening to news updates on the oral argument currently taking place at the Supreme Court is getting a bit scary. If the ‘slippery slope’ argument is being taken seriously, then the dispute over universal health care is taking an odd turn, surprisingly odd.

Reportedly Mr. Justice Scalia posed a question to government lawyers something along the lines of this one: If the government can make you buy health insurance, what’s next? Broccoli? Can’t the government then make the argument that since broccoli is good for you, you will have to buy broccoli?

This is what broccoli looks like

The simplest, clearest answer to this question–assuming it has been reported accurately–is that there is no analogy between health insurance and broccoli. There are plenty of foods with the nutritional value of broccoli. If we’re talking about healthful diet–and where I am right now, in the lovely state of Louisiana, there is little discussion of that–there are plenty of substitutes for broccoli.

There are no substitutes for health insurance.

(N.b.: My own judgment is still that single-payer would be better. If Mr. Justices Scalia, Alito and Roberts come down in favor of eliminating the insurance industry as middlemen/gatekeepers to health care or medical attention, I have to admit that I will feel a certain sympathy for them. I’m only human.)

Slippery-slope arguments are usually feeble.

One problem with them is that they can usually be reversed. They cut both ways, not to hash a metaphor farther.

Take the broccoli question. The underlying argument seems to be that government cannot force us to do something just because it’s good for us. The oddity in this position is that all law, government, and justice is based on an (Aristotelian) concept of good. If we are not better off with law than without, why have law? If we human beings are not better off with the forms of government, why have government? If we are not better off with a justice system, why have a justice system?

So let’s try the slippery-slope argument on that one. If government cannot require something of us BECAUSE it is to our good, then can we have law? No. If government cannot require something of us because it is to our good, then can we have government? No. If government cannot require something of us because it is to our good, then can we have a justice system? No.

No justice system, no courts. No courts, no judges. Q.E.D.

I assume Mr. Justices Scalia et al. have sufficient saved up to live on.

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Why aren’t tea partiers angry about insurance abuses? Part 1.

Tea Party rally

CPAC came and went its course in Washington this year, revealing once again that it has nothing to offer in the way of principled conservatism. As might be expected of supposed ‘rebels’ actually backed by big-time funding, it also demonstrated, to any tea partiers actually paying attention, that ‘conservative’ movers and shakers are no more genuinely concerned about fundamental conservative principle than is the GOP.

Media outlets can focus all they want to on a rift between the establishment GOP and its far right. But in truth, whether you are talking about Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio in Florida, Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas, or John McCain and J. D. Hayworth in Arizona, the supposed rift is only a muffin-top crackle on the deeper blendedness of the two ‘wings’: They are all opposed to taxing the super-wealthy, regardless of how poor the rest of the country gets; and they are all opposed to reining in the abuses of corporations, regardless of the number of deaths.

That is both the sign and the deep structure of their version of ‘conservatism.’ That is basically their reason for being in politics. They are in power for one purpose and one purpose only, to prevent any fiscal reforms that would redress the abuses of monopoly, of consolidation of power, of ownership in a few hands—the kind of thing we see increasingly in the U.S., from the lovely Maryland village of Ellicott City owned by real estate interests, to whole mountains in Appalachia owned by coal companies, to control of the insurance market in entire states by one insurance company or a few companies.

Test this proposition. With all the railing about deficits, do you ever see Crist-Rubio, Perry-Hutchison, or McCain-Hayworth suggesting that we curb tax giveaways to corporations that ship U.S. jobs overseas? Do you ever see them recommend that we eliminate tax havens in the Caymans? Do they ever recommend that we rein in abuses including outright fraud by big-time military and security contractors?

Quite the contrary: Hayworth, in particular, is running on a nearly overt promise of increasing slush-fund giveaways for ‘border security,’ which means contractors. Hayworth, who was tied for years to now-imprisoned super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, may be a particularly blatant example of a candidate openly soliciting contributions from the military-security-surveillance sector. But he is by no means alone. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas does the same.

Texas Governor Rick Perry