I've been meaning to start a blog. I figure it is a way for me to let the world know how much better off it would if I were in charge of everything. No, wait, that was my dad's idea.
I don't want to be in charge of everything. Sometimes I don't want to be in charge of anything.
I have a husband and three children. I often feel that I have no life of my own, which is crazy because I also work full-time for money, besides my full-time unpaid careers.
I guess I can use this space to express my own ideas about things. OK, I'll give it a go.
Health care: This is so whacked out at this point, that trying to make heads or tails of what is right is darn near impossible. Do I think life should be prolonged at all costs - NO WAY! Do I believe in social euthanasia - NO WAY! The sheer rhetoric of health care "discussions" is so over the top, no one can possibly be right. Where is the common ground? What is the common sense? I cannot imagine terminating a pregnancy, but I was blessed with three healthy and desired pregnancies. I cannot imagine having cancer either, because I never have. The best I can do is speculate, and law should not be speculative. It should certainly not reflect a narrow perspective. At this point, I'm leaning toward a preference for a two-tiered system, much as I hate the idea of it. The reality is that the greatest luxury is almost inevitably going to go to the person with the most money. Consider who gets to go to elite preparatory schools. It's hard to figure out what should go into a basic health plan: prenatal care - in, infertility treatment - out, appendectomy - in, heart-lung transplant - out. One of the hardest parts of coming up with a health plan is the lies that so many people believe in our society, that failure is never acceptable, and that death is a failure. Death is part of life as much as birth; nobody lives forever. Matter of fact, I often call life a terminal condition, just to keep things in perspective. People need to live their lives in a healthy way, respecting and maintaining the bodies we have each received. That way, fewer resources would be needed to prop up unhealthy lifestyles, and more could be available for the unexpected or unusual. We need as a society to take responsibility for self-maintenance, and give up this crazy reliance on chemical maintenance. We need as a society also to focus on the normal majority, instead of generating collective angst about what might happen. Overall, about 87% of women will never have breast cancer. With all the knowledge and technology and everything today, the most sensible thing to do is just to live our lives, eat well (that is, eat to live, not live to eat), and if one becomes ill, then deal with it. All the worry in the world will not keep a person healthy.
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Could you further describe exactly what you mean by a two-tiered perspective? Right now there are a whole bunch of levels of medical coverage, including none.
ReplyDeleteKnowing full well how I would be in disagreement with the majority of people in the room, I went to a town hall meeting with my congressman (Jason Chaffetz) who wants undocumented aliens to be rounded up into internment camps while they wait for deportation. Even with the free-for-all shouting match going on, more than one person at the town hall meeting gave an account of how the private health care insurance companies don't deserve to exist; they are more than willing to collect premiums, but when it comes to paying claims, all manner of games are played to short circuit the sick. If they can't compete with a public option, it is because they are overpriced and unneccessary.
And the tort reform Republicans are always pointing to as a necessary part of health care reform is also garbage. Settlements for provider errors is around 3% of the cost of health care in this country while the insurance bureaucracy is between 30% and 40%. And when a provider makes a mistake, the victim often needs that settlement to cover the extra care the mistake requires.
My understanding of two-tiered is that everyone receives a (to be determined) basic level of health care, with more expensive/risky/experimental/unsupported by research options to those who can either afford to pay for them out of pocket, or by buying insurance that would cover these extensions. It would still be a money-maker for the insurance companies, because the more exotic the treatment, the less likely it will ever be needed or used. The questions remain, of course, what constitutes basic health care, and who decides.
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