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Great list with some I missed, so thanks! (Hey that rhymed )

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Wow, thanks for linking to my blog. I really appreciate it . By the way, there are some great articles, I’m going to check them out. Thanks for sharing. See you soon.

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As with any challenging and complex issue, the devil is in the details. While some experts and our President believe that a public plan option will increase competition and therefore help keep healthcare costs down, I believe this logic is severely flawed. Normally, more competition is a good thing. However, if the public plan model has any similarities to Medicare, it will clearly have an unfair advantage over private competition and will ultimately result in driving private competion out of the marketplace. Such a scenario will pave the path for a single payor system in our country. As Britain can attest, their single payor system is faced with numeroous challenges of their own.

Mr. Scott Harrington, Professor of healthcare management and insurance/risk management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania wrote in a 6/15/09 Wall Street Journal article (“The ‘Public Plan’ Would Be the Only Plan”) that “It’s impossible for private insurers to ‘compete’ with government”. This is because Medicare and Medicaid underpay providers (well below costs, as verified by MEDPAC) which is cost-shifted to commercial payers.

Suggesting that it is more than reasonable for private plans to compete with a public plan seems to make logical sense, but it doesn’t take into account the extreme subsidy that public plans receive.

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Out of the 46 million uninsured, 12 million who qualify for public health care never sign up…10 million who can afford health care and who make triple the poverty level purposely choose not to buy any health insurance… and over 10 million are illegal aliens. So that leaves approximately 14 million… which is less than 5% of the US population. Obama is actually proposing to overhaul the entire health care system to accommodate less than 5% of the population. That makes absolutely no logical sense…. especially when over 80% of the population is happy with the current health care system.

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Healthcare reform, yes. Public health plan, no. Where is the evidence that government has done a great job controlling cost in Medicare with the billions in overpayments and fraud? Medicare is bankrupt due to government mismanagement and overspending. Fortunately, the Medicare program will continue as long as there are taxpayers who can be billed to cover the cost. This is an unfortunate reality that is spurring the rise of American opposition to a public health plan. Taxpayers know that a public health plan would likely never be financially accountable in the same way that managed care organizations are accountable. If the public plan overspends in healthcare benefits against the revenues they recieve in premiums, then the government will step in to bill the taxpayer for the overspend. The taxpayer, in this case, is the majority of Americans in the working middle class. While non-public health plans manage the medical costs against the revenues they receive in premiums, any overspend in healthcare benefits are their loss and is not covered by the taxpayer.
So what can be done? For starters, Congress should enact legislation that minimizes medical liability. Too much is spent in defensive medical tests and procedures. Second, the government needs to be honest with its citizens and come clean in telling the truth about their proposals. What they accuse the evil managed care companies of doing, they will also do in a public plan; which is control cost and wasteful spending by promoting evidence-based guidelines, implementing an aggressive prior authorization process, and denying care to those Americans that do not meet medical necessity for the prescribed services. This is what President Obama hinted at in the ABC program on his healthcare proposal. He left the woman who had a 105 year old mother with a pacemaker to believe that her mother at 100 years of age would probably not be eligible for a $30,000 pacemaker procedure. Under the efficiencies of a public plan, her mother would probably not live to 105. But the public plan would cover the cost of pain medications and other services to make her comfortable until death. And although the woman mentioned that since receiving the pacemaker, her mother’s medical costs had reduced, under evidence-based guidelines, a 100 year old with high healthcare costs associated with multiple hospital and ER visits would not be a good candidate to spend $30,000 for a pacemaker. This is what controlling medical costs is all about and it does not make a difference if you are in a public plan or a non-public managed-care plan. Instead, I would suggest the government pass legislation that addresses healthcare needs of citizens with pre-existing conditions, expand Medicaid, and change Medicaid law to allow states more flexibility in implementing copayments and different benefit structures. People who need health insurance but are unable to afford it should be able to buy into their state Medicaid plan and the plans would be tailored to their life-style, medical, and financial means. Finally, just as most states require auto insurance to drive a car, health insurance should be mandated to all citizens. Of the 46 million uninsured, nearly 12 million are people who qualify for public health programs but never sign up for them. Nearly half of the uninsured are illegal aliens. Requiring health insurance for all citizens and providing innovative governmental ideas like health insurance vouchers, spurs competition in the healthcare industry and drives down cost.

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