Only 50 mil. uninsured Americans! Thanks, health insurance reform!
Nearly 50 million Americans have gone without health insurance for at least part of the past year — up from 46 million people in 2008, federal health officials reported Tuesday.
Those people included not only those Americans living in poverty, but an increasing number of middle-income people, according to a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….
“The first myth is that it’s only the poor who are uninsured. In fact, half of the uninsured are over the poverty level,” [CDC Director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden] said.
“The second myth is that it’s only healthy people who are uninsured and that young healthy people make a choice not to have health insurance. In fact, more than two out of five individuals who are uninsured at some point during the past year had one or more chronic diseases,” he said.
During the past 10 years, the number of U.S. adults without insurance for at least part of the year has risen an average of 1.1 million people a year, and about half are middle-income adults, according to the report.
Of course, the real beneficiaries of Obama’s health insurance reform are the bloodsucking middlemen who contribute nothing, raise costs through infuriating paperwork — my wife and I could lecture you for hours about our fights with insurance companies — and administrative costs (all aimed at not paying for treatments to raise insurers' profits), and sucking profits out of the system that would otherwise stay in patients' pockets or reimburse hospitals and doctors. As Congressman Dennis Kucinich explained:
It’s not the best we can do. It mandates people purchase private insurance. It is a $70 billion giveaway to private insurance companies and locks in this system that’s the problem, not the solution.
And so, I made every effort, right from the beginning, as you know, as a single-payer advocate. We couldn’t really make this bill single payer; that was taken off the table. But we did something else: We were able to get a bill in the committee passed that would protect the right of states to be able to have—to pursue a not-for-profit healthcare plan at a state level to shield it from legal attack. And that was taken out of the legislation after it had passed. It was taken out by the administration, which has whittled down the public option to the point of not having it truly compete with insurance companies.
So what you have here is people continuing to be at the mercy of the insurance companies, except in this case the government is going to subsidize the policies. People are still going to have premiums, co-pays and deductibles to deal with. And, you know, there’s really a great deal of question here as to what in the world we’re doing in creating a healthcare system that’s really based on the premises of private insurance….
We’re told that the only choice we have is to buy private insurance, and with the robust public option being gone, it makes sure that there’s little competition with the insurance companies. This bill doesn’t effectively moderate what they can charge for premiums or co-pays or deductibles. It just says people have to have insurance. Well, insurance doesn’t necessarily equate to care.
Posted by James on Wednesday, November 10, 2010