We're Not Fine

I heard people on the radio today protesting to Senators at a town hall meeting how they don't want the country to turn into Russia and along the way more than once I heard someone say "we're fine, leave us alone." I don't know what metric they use to come up with "fine" but we're not fine.

I guess if you are just going along, paying your bills and you have decent insurance or you are on Medicare then it might be possible to be kind of myopic and think we're fine. But you don't have to really dig too far to know that we're not.

Other than health care one of the principal problems of this moment in time is job loss. I wonder if those people at the town halls saying "we're fine" think the current state of employment in this country is fine. I wonder if they'd also be surprised to find out that one of the biggest factors weighing on the job picture is the cost of health insurance. One of the primary reasons business owners ship jobs offshore is so that they can save the cost of benefits. Maybe if health care weren't their problem they would think twice about sending jobs to India or China.

Many people complain that even when we are able to create new jobs that they turn out to be part time gigs rather than full time and that someone having lost their old job now has to pick up two or three jobs just to stay level. Don't people know that one of the single biggest factors in deciding to create a full time job is the cost of benefits? Maybe if employers weren't forced to provide health insurance to full time workers they would opt to create more full time jobs rather than cobbling together part timers to stay away from benefits.

Do the people who say "we're fine" watch the news or read the paper - something other than FOX News or the Limbaugh Letter? If they do they would know that several states around the country are bankrupt or cannot close holes in their budgets. Can they make the connection between the state's budget woes and soaring state employee benefits costs? Do they understand that medical prices outpacing inflation and all the people losing their insurance are a crushing blow to state Medicaid budgets? I wonder if the Governator of California or the Governor of Pennsylvania would say "we're fine, leave us alone?"

I wonder if these people who are so sure we're fine know anyone whose employer recently "revamped" their insurance package. I went through that at work, and hidden deeply within all of the choices and rules and options, buried under the PPO and HMO and HSA acronyms was one startling message - if you dug deep enough to find it: regardless of what you are getting, it is less care for more money than it was under the last package. With costs going up and employers having to continue to broker insurance their only options are to raise employee contributions or diminish the substance of the care.

For a while I worked at a shop where I called the insurance "insurance of last resort." I was lucky to be covered under another plan I had COBRA'd from a prior employer, so I could look at it from the outside. What my co-workers had was basically the insurance an employer gets pretty much just to say they give their employees insurance. No wellness coverage, very high deductibles - insurance in name only; great if you never have to use it. None of them were fine.

We're not fine.
We need substantial (read "single payer") insurance reform now.
We need substantial medical practice reform now.
We need substantial medical litigation reform now.
We're not fine. Please, please, please do NOT just leave us alone.