Health care is an issue in this country.

Case in point: My doctor charges $3800 to deliver a baby. My insurance company will be paying less that $500 of that fee. We currently pay about $160 per month to have me insured through my husband’s company. Nine months of pregnancy… You do the math.

Now, it’s not as black-and-white as that - we are actually benefiting by being insured thanks to some convoluted system of mathematics. But the point is, health care is expensive, and a lot of the time insurance is just as expensive.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to the various candidates’ stances on health care (despite the fact that it makes my brain hurt), and found that there are a lot of variations in their proposed plans. Everything from the truly ridiculous to the completely ineffective.

Every time I think I’ve found a candidate’s plan I can agree with, I read something else that makes me go “whoa, wait a minute.” My stance as I’ve established it so far…

• I think health insurance should be made more affordable, by whatever means is effective.
• Health insurance should not be forced on everyone by the government (-Clinton, -Edwards), with the possible exception of children (+Obama). I am resistant to the government telling me where I have to spend my money.
• I do not think the health care industry should be intimately controlled by the government (-Edwards).
• The money for a health plan intended for the poor should not come exclusively out of the pocket of the rich (-Edwards).
• A “single-payer” system is akin to socialized medicine, despite the claim that the government would not control medicine. If the government is footing the bill, you’d better believe it’s going to have some control. (-Edwards)
• Drug companies should be restricted regarding conflicts of interest, overcharging for medication, and keeping competitive generics off the market. (+Clinton, +Obama)
• Pre-existing conditions clauses pretty much suck. (+Obama)
• While a $15,000 per person tax credit/deduction may sound wonderful, you have to actually come up with a way to finance it. (-Giuliani)
• “Tax deductible” doesn’t equal “affordable.” (-Romney)
• Throwing money at low income families doesn’t mean they’re going to spend it on health insurance - and if they don’t, then you haven’t solved any problems. (-Giuliani)
  

And that’s where I’ll leave off for now. Although, I do have some questions that I have not seen any of the candidates answer.

I don’t have a problem with the goal of having health care accessible to everyone. But I want to know how they’re going to deal with the problems that creates. Like, if everyone can go to the doctor whenever they need/want to, how are they going to handle the shortage of doctors that has occurred in the UK and other countries? I don’t want to wait 3 weeks to get an appointment for an illness I have now. Or what about the tendency of doctors to rush through appointments and just issue a prescription without taking the time to really “see” a patient? How much worse is that going to get when they have twice as many patients to see? And how can we guarantee no shortage of medications if they’re accessible to everyone? It’s a really big problem in other countries, and we already have to stand in lines to get flu shots.

As with several of the issues surrounding this election, I’m having a hard time with the health care thing. I’ll probably write some more on it again later. But for now, it’s time for bed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.