I am a supporter of the public option plan for many reasons. Here’s my favorite. I don’t want my healthcare payments to be used to finance some company’s shareholder dividends, lobbying efforts, excessive CEO bonuses, golden parachutes, company jets, condos in Bermuda, or another diamond bracelet for the girlfriend.
Health care is a service that rightly belongs in the hands of government. Health care is too important to be reserved exclusively for the volatile and wildly fluctuating for-profit sector provider.
Both sides on this issue say the same thing: it’s about having a choice. OK. I choose the public option. If I can’t have my choice, then I really don’t have a choice, and someone is lying to me. Or so it would seem.
The nature, and the special needs of an individual living out his or her so-called golden years must not be made into a commodity to be traded like soy beans or pork bellies, on a stock market that, just recently, nearly collapsed. This is not the proper place for health care.
We should have learned by now that there are some things that simply do not belong in the risky and uncertain for-profit publicly-traded environment. What if the market goes down just when grandma needs a hip replacement? The rule in business is that the first responsibility is to the company, to its stockholders, not to the customer. And if times are tough, the company will decide that the broken hip was the result of a pre-existing condition, and therefore is not covered.
That’s the point. If the market is down and profits are off, Grandma won’t get a new hip, and Uncle Ned won’t get new knees. This is happening right now. Everybody knows somebody who has been denied, dropped or had his premiums raised. Like bad breath in dogs, the problem is endemic to for-profit corporations. You’ll never get rid of the odor. The best you can do is control it, and have a public option. For-profit is not my option of choice.
Furthermore, if health care is limited to for-profit providers, they will inevitably merge just like the insurance companies did, and history will have repeated itself, thus proving that we have learned nothing from it. It is a slam-dunk that, without a public option we will eventually end up with a healthcare company that is too big to fail, just like we ended up with an insurance company too big to fail. Endless expansion and risk, and all of the associated instability and uncertainty are an inescapable part of the for-profit business world. This is the wrong place for health care.
After having been through all this before, we haven’t learned yet. But there’s still time. The first thing we must do is to stop thinking stupidly. For example, if our American, democratically elected government is really of, by and for the people, then why should we-the-people be afraid of our own government or of a government-run healthcare option? We’re saying that we’re afraid of ourselves. We’re saying it’s a fight between me and myself, that I am my own enemy. How stupid is that!