Obama's Health Care Fix
Sep 10, 2009
obama, president, reform, states, united
US President Barack Obama recently spoke to Congress in a bid to gain much needed consensus for his proposed overhaul of the US health care system.
Obama made health care reform a key part of his election platform and it now stands as his top domestic priority. But his plan to enact sweeping health care legislation has caused a predictable backlash amongst many American citizens and legislators, and has been amended several times in a bid to find common ground.
But the efforts of the President have been largely futile. Opposition amongst Republicans has been fierce, and the good old scare tactics of ‘socialized medicine’ and ‘Canadian-style health care’ have been trotted out to scare the daylights out of US citizens. Even though some 50 million Americans have no health-care at all, those on the right, even in the Democratic Party, are doing whatever is necessary to scuttle the President’s plans.
Of course, overhauling an ineffective system isn’t cheap. Even though millions of Americans are without coverage, the US still spends pretty much more per capita on health care than the rest of the industrialized world. This is largely because of administrative and bureaucratic costs. Obama has stated that the changes he wants would cost about $900 billion over a decade, or, in his words “less than [the US] spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans” that were introduced during the Bush administration.
If Obama succeeds in reforming health care it will be almost a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for it. This is not something that is easy to accomplish in the US. It’s still unclear on what the plan would look like. The President has had to back off a bit from the completely public option because of mounting opposition. He even went so far as to tell Congress – and by extension the American public - that Canadian-style government –run health care was likely too radical for Americans. However, he would make it illegal for health insurance companies to drop those who become ill, and everyone would be required to buy basic insurance. The private sector would still play a role, but reforms and competition would be aimed at making private insurers accountable.
Instead of a solely public system, Obama is now open to allowing private insurance companies to compete with the public sector, provided that they change the way they do things. And if that doesn’t happen within a certain time frame, the President made it clear that “if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, [I] will provide you with a choice.”
What this choice will look like when and if it becomes reality is anyone’s guess. And even though the President’s original idea of a reformed health care system might look radically different than the one that results, it’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t be dramatically better than the one that exists at present.
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Obama's intentions are good, but even those in his own party are giving him problems.
Jim Cotton - -0001-11-30 00:00
This is a test of the blog comment system
Ross McDowall - 2009-12-10 09:50
This is a test of the blog comment system from IE 8
Ross McDowall - 2009-12-10 09:52
This is a test of the blog comment system from IE 7
Ross McDowall - 2009-12-10 09:54
This is a test of the blog comment system from IE 6
Ross McDowall - 2009-12-10 09:55
Another test checking a change in the redirect
Ross McDowall - 2009-12-10 13:46