Believe me, I am the first person to admit that our country’s healthcare and health insurance system is broken and needs to be reformed. There are way too many people who just plain can’t get health insurance, or it’s just so expensive that they could never afford it. Many states have high risk health insurance pools for these folks, but even that coverage is often still too expensive.
According to my understanding of Mr. Obama’s healthcare plan (which may not be accurate), he wants to add millions of new people to the Medicare plan (essentially) which is already over-burdened and headed for financial disaster. The current numbers already don’t add up with the people who are already on Medicare, and the baby-boomers yet to come. I don’t see how you can add on additional tens of millions of new patients to an already almost-broke system.
For those of you who are looking forward to having access to the Medicare-like insurance plan, let me just mention what another country with a similar “you-get-to-choose” system is experiencing. As Mr. Obama has said, people would have the option of either staying on their own private insurance plan, or opting for the government subsidized plan. Germany has a similar system with two sets of people, those on the government plan, and those on private health insurance plans. They also have two sets of hospitals, those for people with private plans, and those for people on the socialized system. The hospitals for privately insured citizens is clean, up-to-date, efficient, friendly, and easy to get into. The hospials for people on the government healthcare plan is crowded, out-of-date, and can take months to get into. On top of this, the doctors who work at the government hospital are the ones who can’t get a job at the private hospital, so they don’t have anyother choice of where to go work. Now just think for a minute…if you had something seriously wrong with you that you really needed help with, like an artery blockage…which hospital would you want to go to? And which kind of doctors would you want working on you?
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure this one out. Our healthcare and health insurance system has some serious problems. But to pay for a plan like this one and make it work, you can be guaranteed that your taxes are going to go way up, and the quality of our healthcare is going to go way down.
