Lloyd Doggett –who was my representative before the Texas Republicans gerrymandered the districts and screwed Austin– held a pro-health care reform meeting this weekend. I just watched a blurb on the morning news about it, and one of the people there protesting had this to say:
“I don’t know how this is going to effect me, but I KNOW by premiums are going to go up and my health care quality is going to go down.”
Well, that’s a lot to know without knowing how it’s going to effect her, isn’t it? It feels like she only knows the talking points she’s heard.
I don’t know exactly how the new health care reform is going to effect me either. I don’t have a crystal ball, so I have no way of knowing what my personal situation will be in a couple of years or how the new law will be changed or implemented as each step is enforced. All I really know right now is that the new regulations on health insurance companies (pre-existing conditions and dumping people when they get sick, etc.) are a good thing, and the worst case scenario for everything else is that nothing at all will change in my non-health insurance (and non-health care having) status. The best case scenario is that I end up with health insurance and get to see a doctor when I need to see one.
So while I am not completely thrilled with my own personal outcome (there might be a possible really worst case scenario I haven’t considered yet), I am quite happy that a lot of people even worse off than myself will be getting the help they need. If somehow I end up paying a little more tax somewhere and that means someone with cancer gets the treatment they need, I won’t be complaining anymore than I complain about having to pay school taxes until retirement age for my non-existent children to not use the school system.
Even though I don’t have that crystal ball to tell me what this health care reform is going to do for me or anyone, I can tell the lady I quoted above that without health care reform, her premiums would have gone up anyway, and eventually they get so high one’s quality of health care does diminish, like when someone can afford the insurance but then can’t afford to use it. So her personal worst case scenario is that nothing at all will change for her either.†
There was also another health care story on the news this morning (an op-ed piece) during which the commentator pointed out that Texas instituted tort reform way back in 2003. The result? Medical malpractice insurance rates did go down, more doctors began to work in areas that desperately needed them, but the cost of health care was not lowered at all. To everyone who continues to suggest that tort reform was all that was needed to solve our health care woes, I do suggest they study how that worked out in Texas, because it was far from being the all-healing salve tort reform supporters insist it would be.
Should I warn you I woke up grumpy this morning? I did. I most definitely did.
Footnotes- † Fact is, nothing at all is going to change for the vast majority of people in the USA. Seriously, if this hadn’t been such a news circus with a million talking heads babbling about it 24/7, very few people would notice anything at all different as health care reform goes into practice. [↩]
Among the poor, dumb, scared class who are used as pawns in this argument, the primary emotion is ‘some colored boy acting uppity and we ain’t gonna take it.’ Were it George Bush who had proposed and signed the same bill into law, he’d have been viewed as a great, compassionate man. Take away the race-fear factor and it’s a non-issue. The only beneficiaries of the drawn-out emotionalism are the press and the opposition party, hoping for added revenue and votes, respectively.