On July 15, Harry Reid got my attention in a post called, “The Two Faces of Harry Reid: Obamacare a Train Wreck or Wonderful?” (http://conoutofconsumer.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-two-faces-of-harry-reid-obamacare.html) and again in my post discussing Harry Reid’s staff choice NOT to have Obamacare and his defense, “It’s legal,” (see post of “Harry Reid: Hypocrite Headliner,” at http://conoutofconsumer.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_4.html).
Now Harry Reid is criticizing the Koch Brothers as, “Dishonest, deceptive, false and unfair.” And complaining, “You can be as immoral and dishonest as your money will allow you to be.” People with money and power in America have a different life from the rest of us…Go figure. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTKPGblYF6o)
What is somewhat hilarious is that it is Senator Reid making the comments. Has he not used his own position and power within government to advocate Obamacare, joining on the governmental bandwagon of deception that brought us promises of premium savings and the opportunity for every American to have health insurance? Not nearly true on last check. And as far as keeping your old plan? The President won the dubious honor of telling the lie of the year for that one.
Today, as the news glows with reports of how smoothly the enrollment process is going, take note of those ignoring the catastrophic impact that is the potential of Obamacare for not only financial but the physical health of Americans.
It is a bad law. Fixing its enrollment process won’t fix the law. It is a bad law because it is founded on fallacies. The biggest fallacy is evidenced by the President’s inability to distinguish between the terms health care and health insurance, using them interchangeably. For those in the real world, this fallacy is a toxin that infects every page of the healthcare law.
In an age where we had and should have continued to move beyond the old-fashioned, simplistic idea that any health insurance is better than none, the only deference paid to the reality that in our society sometimes no health insurance was not worse than having some health insurance is evidenced by the fact that the PPACA has a mandate that you purchase coverage or else face a tax, because many thinking Americans had realized that no health insurance in many cases would better preserve their assets than throwing out money on insufficient insurance.
Obamacare is bad law because health insurance does not equal healthcare. In fact the healthcare crisis was NOT caused because of NOT having insurance, it was a complex problem with a great segment of the population going broke even WITH INSURANCE because of out of control prices for obtaining needed medical care WHEN WE GET SICK.
As we experience the reality of Obamacare, it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that the law is bad law because it is based on the old-fashioned fallacy that health insurance equals health care. It would be as if our government wrote a law concerning navigating a flat earth. Such a law could have provisions that could accidentally be helpful, such as avoiding sailing in high winds, but would be rendered meaningless because it’s based on fallacy.
I don't advocate necessarily repealing the law, but ignoring the flaws in this law will prevent addressing those flaws before they injure Americans. For instance, acknowledging the basic fact that underinsurance can at best only put off financial ruin if you get sick could incentivize consumers and lawmakers to change the available plans away from cheaper "catastrophic" or "bronze" plans unless they had a spouse under whom they had better coverage and to really focus on getting people a usable tool to help pay for health care costs when they're sick, which is all we need the product of health insurance to do. Instead, by relying on the fallacy that health insurance equals health care, we declare success in taking money from people for plans that will likely leave them broke if they become ill. That neither incentivizes insurers to create better products, nor does it incentivize providers to stop increasing costs, and ultimately, it codifies what was, is and continues to be wrong with our healthcare environment.
