Do You Know What Will Happen to your Health Insurance?

Some are applauding the House passage of heath care reform. Some aren't. But try to get a straight answer on what the proposed legislation will do and you'll be lucky to find someone with a clue. The bill passed in the House, HR3962, was nearly 2000 pages long, while a simpler more direct approach, HR626 introduced and then withdrawn at the last minute by Congressman Weiner, is only 32 pages and simply expands medicare to cover all Americans.

In a letter to the New York Times some young Obama supporters are asking, what will this mean for me? They aren't finding any answers, only more questions.

Sam Rosenberg asks:

When the House passed its version of a health care reform bill on Saturday night, I saw the update on television while out celebrating the 27th birthday of a friend. Almost everyone in attendance was in their mid- to late 20s and college-educated and had voted for President Obama.

But we all had different insurance plans. Some were insured by their jobs; others by their unions; and some, recently unemployed or self-employed, were not insured at all.

And while we all celebrated the president’s and the House’s achievement, not a single one of us was able to answer two seemingly basic questions — how will this bill affect my current benefits, and how will this bill affect my current payments?

My friends and I support health care reform because we believe the current system is failing. But now that change may finally be coming, we want to know exactly what that change entails.
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The point of contention here is the health insurance industry and all the related services such as medical debt. In the U.S., unlike any other country, people often go into debt to pay for medical treatment to merely survive. So the banking industry has a big stake as well as the insurance industry. Obama has said that these industries amount to one-sixth of our economy. But in an economy that is top heavy with the 1% most wealthy people owning more wealth than 95%, you have to ask, how many people are actually affected by this particular one-sixth of the economy? An awful bug chuck of that one-sixth has to be attributed to that top 1%. Should we forsake the 95% for the 1% just because they are greedy enough to take one-sixth of the economy for themselves, a lot of it in the form of foreclosures on people forced to pay up just to live?

So now we have the Senate focused on how to preserve the status quo for the health insurance industry, that one-sixth of the economy, while forsaking 95% of the people.

Whop-dee-doo. We passed health care in the House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opinion/l10health.html

Image is from Deavere Smith in her one-woman show “Let Me Down Easy,” now playing Off Broadway, a story ten years in the making of one man's comeback from death and the heath care system he dealth with in the process. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/health/10easy.html