Health care reform

Cynthia Tucker says in her AJC column today: "Any genuine health care reform will have to eventually eliminate the profit-making health insurance industry."

She's right, and it's time someone put it this candidly. In trying to get a reform bill that can be passed by Congress, Obama is presenting a compromise that will offer a government program (sort of Medicare for everybody) to compete with private insurance programs. And that's what has conservatives upset, along with the insurance industry.

They're shouting that it would be unfair competition, because they have to make a profit for their shareholders. Well, yes. That's the very problem. As a society, we should be squarely facing the decision about our goal: is it a healthy citizenry or profits for an industry?

A government program not only would eliminate the profit-making, it would eliminate the absurd lengths insurance companies go to now to avoid insuring sicker patients and to deny claims to those they do insure. This, along with all their advertising and marketing costs, plus big executive salaries, keep driving up costs of medical care.

It has been shown that eliminating those administrative costs would save enough money to cover all the uninsured people in the country today. The only way to significantly reduce costs under private plans is to ration care.

We're probably going to wind up with a camel -- you know -- a horse designed by a committee. That is, there will be some kind of partial reform that will probably be a nightmare of compromise. But it must retain a government-sponsored competing plan, and work toward single-payer later.

If our politics were less driven by moneyed interests, we would adopt a European style single payer insurance program now. But we can't do that; we have to muddle through and hope someday we can do what needs to be done now.

Ralph