Why Is There A Health Care Reform Stalemate? Because There's A Language Disconnect, ...!

With auto insurance, every new driver can find auto insurance. Differences in rates depending on age are understood by everyone as routine.

After one accident maybe there's a rate increase depending on fault. After three or more accidents the driver gets penalized, the rates increase or the driver might get dropped. Even in these cases, the actions of the auto insurance companies are not only acceped but the public, tho maybe grudglingly, empathizes with the decisions as "just business". Even the driver's family usually steps in with a supportive "hey, cousin Bob maybe it's time you start using the BUS".

So cousin Bob loses his auto insurance and stops driving. Is that the end of Bob's getting around town? NO! Because Bob has ...OPTIONS!!!

Cousin Bob can use the public bus and can still get out and about, and affordably too. And everyone is happy or at least OK - the families, and Cousin Bob. And no one blames the auto insurance companies who are happier than a pig in XXX to get rid of the risk.

Now substitute "health care" for "auto" in this story and the problem becomes clear. America is not being served well by an insurance-model health care system where unhealthy, younger clients are simply dropped like bad drivers....because there is no option to go to! No one can or should expect Cousin Bob to simply die once he gets too sick to insure. But, like with auto insurance, a public health care option seems natural and should be part of the health care picture. In America, though, there is no health care option to private insurance unless one can qualify for medicare.

And the problem in Washington is the public option is a politically taboo subject for the Republicans....so, stalemate..and it is not even possible to discuss an option.

The result of trying to dodge the public health care option is a series of awkward "patch-quilt" attempts to create substitutes for a public option without really having a public option or even without having an option to for-profit insurance. Thus, the stumbling forth of "mandated" insurance which is an absurd frankenstein of self-delusion and words-stuck-in-mouth.

And this is the point of why all this health care reform debate has been so lengthy, traumatic and seemingly without solution. There is a LANGUAGE DISCONNECT.

INSURANCE IS NOT COVERAGE!! Health care insurance companies do not exist to serve the public or the nation. They exist to make profit, either that or go under.

Health care insurers operate just like any other insurance companies: if you become a risk (get sick) the companies will drop you! Ha, you say?! Well, that's what their stockholders expect them to do...plus, it's all above board and written down in the company charter.

The health care debate should not be about insurance. The health care insurance sector is doing just fine, thank you. But, America's health care system is gonzo, too expensive (17% of GDP), not covering everyone (40+ million uninsured), and getting worse.

The solution? First get the language straight, then apply logical analogies like the above story. We need public alternatives to private health care insurance, or better - a public, one source health care system.

Health Care: Insurance vs. Coverage = Apples and Oranges

It occurred to me that it is hard to make sense of the debate on health care because the various points of view are bogged down in the muck trying to compare apples and oranges, to use a good analogy. The debaters indiscriminately refer to "insurance" (apples) and "coverage" (oranges) as if they are the same.....but they are not the same.

Nutshell view: health care INSURANCE is not health COVERAGE!!

More: health care INSURANCE is a PRODUCT not a SERVICE!!

CONSEQUENCE: when the health care insurance businesses "cull" bad risks (get rid of very ill patients and cancel their insurance) they are doing what comes naturally as for-profit businesses by doing what is beneficial to their stockholders, maximizing profits. Insurance businesses survive and grow by this practice, so dont blame them for it...blame Americans-as-a-group short-sightedness and blame the lack of understanding of the english language on the part of the media, politicians and citizens. Everyone with an open mouth is, with only few exceptions, making this mistake.

CONCLUSION: America needs a 100% health care COVERAGE system. This can only come by a one-payer national service. The health care insurance businesses still have a role as sellers of insurance policies for extra-ordinary health emergency/specialist treatments.

Serious stuff: what ever happened to the congressional assistqant staff that would have remembered all of this and been able to distinguish "insurance" from "coverage"? This arm of Congress was apparently disbanded for eithepolitical or economizing reasons, or both. The cost to the nation will greatly exceed the cost of continuing that assistance staff. Also, this paralysis of public policy-making is the result of the nation having bought into, at least subliminally, the ideology of privitization beginning with Reagan. The result is as if every American resource is reduce to equivalency as a market item - citizens as labor, oil and minerals, meat animals, real estate,... everything. America seems to have lost the concept of itself as a nation of people first and above all.

Public Policy Follies, #1: Whence Cometh the Recession and Health Care Crisis

This is written in the spirit of not so much as to be fair-minded, but to express my wonderment at the current wringing of hands and woe-crying from the media and public about the "apparent" causes of the current recession,the health care crisis, and the supposed "greed and excess of business, that I felt the whole picture needed to be discussed and perhaps explained. I am not necessarily pro-business but like to think I am clear minded in some areas, or try to be.

Our business institutions are not parasitic!! In truth, they are staffed by human beings who learn to do their jobs well. As businesses, they are doing what they are supposed to do – maximize profit. They were granted permissions to excess, and freed from common sense regulatory boundaries, by deregulations granted by a series of free-market ideological administrations ... and “voila” here we are deep in the muck of confusion. We've become entrapped in an ideological mire of our own, maybe misguided, making...believing that we can have a "free" market that we can just walk away from and it will govern itself. Wrong! A simple understanding of human nature would tell us, "WRONG". "For-profit", "Privatizing" and de-regulating have naturally given us "health care" INSURANCE institutions that pay most attention to the profit line and least to actual health COVERAGE". De-regulating banking and investment opened the gates to rampant “greed” - profit seeking, searching for regulatory and tax loop holes (“cheating”?), and big rewards – what businesses normally do, and eventual collapse of the economy. What do you expect!!!! Come on.

If you deregulate the business environment for these institutions, you get the plainly obvious - a collection of runaway (but focused) bulls in a china shop. Perhaps more to the point, you can't hope that lions can be made to like oatmeal.

So what is the problem? Less than well-thought out, though perhaps sincere, privatizations and deregulations have given us the current recession, the current health care problem, and more public policy confusions. The solution? Stop the crying and repair the financial regulatory fences and estqablish a public health care "coverage" through a one-payer system. Then let the business Bulls play to their hearts’ content and restore the economy. We can then watch the show in safety.