Friday, October 09, 2009

The Secret of the North

by Rich Miles

There's a dirty little secret being revealed in Massachusetts. You know, that state up north where the former governor, Mitt Romney, rammed through a universal health care bill REQUIRING that all residents of the state have health insurance? The state where they actually FINE residents who don't have the money for health insurance?

And a writer named Wendy Button, a former speechwriter for some of the brightest lights in liberal thought, has written a summary with an admittedly subjective, what-I'm-not-getting-from-it POV. But Ms. Button's description has the advantage of being from the perspective of someone who has gotten her insurance from a reasonably priced (yes, there is such a thing) place like Washington DC to the state with the highest health insurance premiums in the country.

Click on the link and read Wendy Button's description of how she went from insured to can't afford to be insured in one geographical move. It's a cautionary tale not only for NOT moving to Massachusetts, but for our Congress as they seek a path through the maze to universal health care.

This doesn't seem an impossible task. Can we reduce it to its simplest form?

Nah. I mean, this is American politics we're talking about, after all. We have that serious, major fuck-up period to go through, then 20 or so years later it gets fixed. More or less.

I'll never live that long.

3 comments:

Jack Jodell said...

This is a powerful argument for taking the profit out of health care. AFFORDABLE Universal coverage will only be achieved when we remove entirely the greed, profit, and administrative cost of private health insurance and replace it with a fully government-run "Medicare for all" program. Bring it on NOW!

Rich Miles said...

Jack, I completely agree with you. But the fact that this idea has never been seriously considered yet, or at least not that I know of, leads me to believe that it never WILL be considered. It's the easy solution, and you know how our Congress is: never file one simple bill when 12 complex ones will do.

Anonymous said...

I think that Wendy was referring to the Baucus Bill.

That bill is DOA.

I have fears just as Wendy does, of what is going to be in a final bill.

If anything appears without a strong "public plan", then I will urge all to vote it down.

A mandate to buy already over-priced medical coverage from the pirates in the private insurance industry, is not only stupid, it is idiotic.