O Canada!

Not to get too political, but now that the whole health care debate has calmed a bit, I'd like to share a few thoughts on the matter. A quick disclaimer; I am only a casual observer of health care policy, and not in any way an expert on this subject.

Let's start from the semi-beginning (I'm not going to start from the very beginning because that would make this a very long story). President Obama was elected on a particular platform. As I remember it, that platform leaned heavily on job creation and universal health care. And I vividly remember crowds at campaign speeches erupting into applause when universal health care was mentioned. I was one of the applauders, after all.

Fast forward to the debate over the health care overhaul bill. Political figures and other conservative leaning folk began a campaign to essentially confuse the public into turning against the bill. I can envision several reasons for this smear campaign, and I have to say that not all of them are sinister. After all, conservatives are called conservatives for a reason, and they generally want to see government out of people's affairs. So some of the people who were against the bill were against it because of their own beliefs of how the federal government should operate. I have no problems with this. We live in a democracy, after all. However, there was a strong, not-so-sublte, and well funded push from health insurance lobby to kill the health care bill. And this push relied quite a bit on lies. Examples include death panels, dismantling of Medicare and Medicaid, and the U.S. transformation into Canada.

And now everyone is confused and screaming at each other at town hall meetings and making Nazi references. The democrats hoped that the whole ordeal would calm down once the bill was passed into law and everyday people started seeing the benefits of it. It sort of did. Except that there are still pundits, politicians, talk show hosts, and reporters talking about how a majority of Americans, according to the polls, don't want the current health reform system. But what you have to keep in mind is that the question being asked in these polls is, "do you support the current health care overhaul law?" Pollees who answer no to this question not only include those who are against big government and who oppose universal health care (and probably didn't vote for Obama), but also those who wanted all-out universal health care and think that the current bill doesn't go far enough. And it's this latter group that I have a message for.

It's important to remember what, exactly, universal health care really boils down to. You give money, usually in the form of a tax, to the government. The government, in turn, insures your health care. During the health care debate, this is what was referred to as 'single payer.' Everybody has to pay the tax, healthy or sick, to keep the tax rate low. Thus the healthy subsidize the sick.

Now here's how the current system works. Everyone buys health insurance and pays a premium to the insurance company. This can be equated to the tax described above. Then the company insures your health care, just as they've always done. Except that, in the past, not everyone has health insurance. Seemingly healthy people opt out, driving up the amount that the insurance company has to dole out, because the ratio of sick to healthy in their risk pool goes up. To counteract this, the insurance company increases premiums and starts implementing devious policies like 'pre-existing conditions' and 'lifetime limits.' So what 'Obamacare' has done is made those devious policies illegal. And then to keep premiums from skyrocketing, you have to make sure that the risk pool has plenty of healthy who can subsidize the sick. This is what the individual mandate does.

If you're not seeing the parallels here, I'll go ahead and spell it out. The current health care bill is nothing more than privatized universal health care. Everyone pays the tax, but it goes to the insurance company rather than the government. And after all of this rambling, I've finally come to the moral of the story. If, like me, you were really hoping that we would see the birth of universal health care in the United States, just remember this: privatized universal health care is better than no universal health care at all.