We don’t often find ourselves agreeing with Howard Dean, the former national chairman of the Democratic Party and star of the 2004 “I Have a Scream” speech.
However, we have a very hard time disputing at least a part of his Dec. 17 letter to The Washington Post in the aftermath of the Senate vote on Christmas Eve. He said: “In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies.”
Thursday’s bill doesn’t do anything serious about costs.
It’s all about coverage. If we can just get everybody insured, everything will be fine - or so the logic seems to go.
OK. The solution to risinghealth care costs is - to pump more money into the system as it stands now?
That sounds a whole lot more like a recipe for inflation than a cure to the real problem.
The real problem is out-of-control health care costs.
There is no amount of money that cannot be consumed by the monstrous rate of inflation in health care costs in America. Let’s repeat that. There is no amount of money that cannot be consumed by the monstrous rate of inflation in health care costs in America.
We are reminded of efforts to tame the federal budget in the 1990s. Once the government realized that they could do something about the built-in increases written into entitlement legislation, out-of-control spending became manageable. Lowering the rate of inflation is key to the whole problem. The Senate’s bill does next to nothing on that for health care.
Let’s put that another way, one our liberal Democratic friends will understand: Osama bin Laden’s still at large in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Senate has just voted to invade Iraq.
We’re chasing the wrong enemy here. Rising health care costs is the reason so many Americans are uninsured. So what’s our response to medical cost increases that price most people out of the market?
Pay it for them with government debt.
Defenders of the measure insist it’s budget neutral, or something close to that.
That’s like having a bucket on sinking ship that’s bailing-neutral. It doesn’t do you any harm but the ship’s still sinking. Also, we don’t believe that budget abracadabra for a minute. Third, they’re only talking about the federal budget. The wider implications are ignored. We cringe at the state tax increases that appear inevitable to meet the Medicaid expansion dictated in the bill. Our state - the fiscally responsible one that doesn’t endlessly borrow to pay its bills - pays for much of Medicaid for people in the state.
Supporters of the Senate bill can argue that this is a first step.
Yes, it is: The first step of what’s likely to be a very clumsy and halting overhaul of our health care system by a dysfunctional Congress. That Congress will grow even more dysfunctional after the likely backlash caused in part by passage of this legislation.
At least this plan, if it becomes law, might make accounting for health care costs easier. People with insurance are increasingly paying more and more to help health care institutions cover the costs of people without insurance. Perhaps if everyone pays in, we will finally see how much health insurance is costing us. The summation is likely to be staggering.
The best thing about the bill, though, might be the provision to let parents keep their children on their family plan insurance until the youngsters turn 27.
That allows somebody to pay something rather than have these youngsters simply go without insurance, as many of them are forced to do.
Our disdain for this bill’s passage is bipartisan.
The Democrats wanted something - anything. The Republicans, however, were not able to propose a serious rival to this weak medicine. That’s a very low threshold to fail.
Opinion, Pages 10 on 12/27/2009