The New York Times reports “Schumer offers middle ground on health care.”
How could this be?
The article describes Schumer offering a limit to the proposed public national health insurance plan so that it can’t compete with private health insurance companies to the best of its ability. The effort for national health insurance is ostensibly beneficial because it could compete with private insurance plans, but would still be an insurance effort that wouldn’t promise complete coverage. Senator Schumer’s idea is not a “middle ground,” it is a move to defend an industry most are discontent with. It is a further push right of an already compromised position from the point of view of public interest.
Today doctors with PNHP and other activists were arrested in a coordinated protest that disrupted the start of a Senate Finance Committee hearing that further demonstrated the degree to which serious consideration of single-payer health care has been and is being avoided by politicians. Democratic Senator and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus both declared “we need more police” and that he respected the views of all Americans — but apparently not enough to include the options quite possibly preferred by a majority of them in his committee hearing. Senator Schumer also sits on this committee.
Single-payer health care, a concept that excludes the middle-man layer of insurance entirely, which Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) says polls show most Americans want, and which most of the western industrialized world has successfully adopted, is seemingly excluded from both political debate and factual scrutiny and reporting by commercial media.
There has been no exhaustive political or media effort to reconcile what most of the western world has done to provide far more health care per dollar to its citizens than the United States has via its private system with the veracity of the positions favoring maintaining an insurance-based system that has failed Americans through under-coverage and complete lack of coverage for 40 million or more Americans. Surely foes of such a system who feel they’re in the right could provide a thorough debunking of PNHP’s resources, including highlighting polls that seem to demonstrate political viability?
I admit heavily linking to them here without providing much balance, as PNHP does a convincing job of demonstrating both support of practicing doctors and aggregating the spare reports of widespread small-d democratic support for their views. In my spare time, I’ve yet to see any criticisms that reconsile their assertions and evidence or thoroughly debunk them. Please share any such challenges you find so well formed.
In related news, my friend Sam Husseini was the originator and a writer in the creation of ads starring Mike Farrell (of M*A*S*H fame) advocating such a plan. That disclosure no doubt indicates a bias on my part to many, but such associations are not the real root of my bias. Rather, it is the acceptance of the stance that health care is a human right. From that position comes my skepticism regarding most political and commercial offerings on the issue (and to me there is no such thing as no bias or individual objectivity for anyone in matters of such broad potential effect). This shouldn’t weaken the observations with regards to apparently non-existent, or at best — disingenuous and weak, public debate on the issue in the Congress.