I want to know what drugs Don Spatz is on and how I can get some. The Reading Eagle must have a very interesting health care program... Mr. Spatz continued his health insurance funded series on this crisis in this morning's paper. Last week he promised us his solution to the broken health care system in today's column. His solution: health savings accounts.
I'm sorry it took me all day to respond but, frankly, I've been on the floor laughing for hours. Health savings accounts? What part of the failed system doesn't he comprehend? HSA's do NOTHING to fix a broken system. Nothing. The primary problem is the private health insurance industry which denies medical care to increase profits (this includes the Blues). It does nothing to ease the burden on businesses with their liability insurance and workman's compensation coverages, nothing to provide long term care and prescription drugs, nothing to foster the competition he cites.
News flash Don: managed care actually decreases the public's choices and ability to shop around for care. The Family and Business Healthcare Security Act will free people to shop for medical care and force doctors and hospitals to compete for patients on a level field. Because medical care will remain privately delivered these providers will actually be able to cut their overhead, not raise it as HSA's would require. Spatz wants to make the system more complicated and more difficult for health care providers to get paid.
We need to simplify that system and reduce those costs so we can provide coverage to everyone. Don Spatz's proposal does the opposite.
How on earth does he think people can shop around for medical care? What planet has he been living on for the past few years? Managed care means you're told what doctors you can see, what hospitals you can use, even what ambulance service you can use, even if you're unconscious and cannot make that decision. It tells you what drugs you can take and what tests you can have. If anything sounds like socialized medicine it's our current, failed system.
Health savings accounts are a band aid for a hemorrhage.
I still cannot believe Don Spatz has sat through several presentations on this issue. Maybe he slept through them, maybe he was on drugs. I want some of those drugs so I can also escape reality. The reality of the nightmare of our current, for profit system. I know because I was one of its victims, as I wrote about on my other blog. I know because I've read Jonathon Cohn's book "Sick" about the history of our system and because I watched Sicko and saw stories similar to mine.
I don't understand everyone to comprehend the problems inherent in our current health care system but I do expect it from a reporter who has sat through presentations about the issue, who purports to write about the issue and proposes a solution and for someone who, seemingly up until now, wasn't strung out on illegal drugs.
Maybe we need to classify Republicanism as a mental illness the way homosexuality was for ages. See, what Don Spatz is doing is parroting the GOP talking points. HSA's are their idea. I understand he's a proud Republican and that's fine but get the facts before you become a member of the Right Wing Noise Machine and do your homework before making yourself look like a fool in your column.
Here's the bottom line: HSA's leave the inurance companies in place. The insurance companies ARE the problem. They actually hire people and pay them based on how much dire medical care they deny to people with lawful contracts for that care. They can do this because, in this country, a corporation's primary legal duty is to make money, not provide medical care. Until we change that Americans will continue to die waiting in emergency rooms or for critical operations and treatments denied them by insurance companies.
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