Today is the anniversary of two moments in early U.S. history that moved me to reflect for a bit. In 1790 Congress established the District of Columbia to be the capital of these United States, and in 1798 the U.S. Public Health Service was established.
I’m not going to spend the rest of my blogging days flogging a dead issue. I suspect the moment to implement a public insurance option or universal health care in the United States has passed for at least a generation, but I am reminded again today of the history of health care in America.
I mentioned somewhere that the first hospital in our America, Pennsylvania Hospital, was chartered by the colony in 1751. (Already we were trailing Europe which had been operating public hospitals for years.)
I was going to throw in some stuff about promoting “the general welfare” being one of the stated purposes of our government, but frankly that’s been used to cover a multitude of what I perceive to be sins. I do believe that providing a baseline level of preventive services, screenings, and health care is a responsibility of government.
Apart from the humanitarian aspects of assuring that the survival needs of our fellow man are being met, there are disease management considerations. One early concern in America was with diseases being brought to our shores by merchant seamen.
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I was going to get into the health insurance industry, but that isn’t really that interesting; it’s really just stupid. We know that our life insurance guy doesn’t love us and we know that our car insurance guy doesn’t love us, but for some strange reason many of us believe that our health insurance carrier loves us. Let me address that: they want your premium dollars – as many of them as they can get – and they want to keep those premium dollars just like any other insurance company. Insurance companies do not provide services.
Blue Cross, of course, was founded as a pre-paid hospital plan for Baylor University Hospital, and Blue Shield was established as a pre-paid physician payment plan in the Northwest. For what they were – employer-paid non-profit health insurance plans – they were fine, but they – and all who have followed them – make their money now by taking in as much as they can and paying out as little as they can while investing your premiums to make as much more money as they can. What’s to love about them?
The thing that made me a little happy this morning was finding this “Top Conservative Blog” entry explaining at least as well as I ever could why there was “a solid precedent for federal involvement in health care, and no precedent at all for a federal mandate to purchase private products.” I’m not ready to kiss whoever wrote this conservative endorsement for the public option, but I might buy him or her a beer or a soft drink.
As for the District, Jackie, you know I love you, but if you want a voting seat in Congress then you should move to a state. If you want to make the constitutionally mandated capital district a state then we should move the capital.
Well you know I agree. I think it’s just common sense to do health care as a nation for the good of us all. Ingineer, who writes in comments sometimes, has said that TB and Whooping Cough are resurging in California because of all the illegal immigrants who come from elsewhere without any health care and bring those problems with them. It is a reason, disease, why we should care about it for us all… and incidentally, why we should stop border traffic and make sure all immigrants here are screened for such diseases otherwise something bad is coming.
As a retiree we are eligible to remain on my former employer’s health care plan; that’s the good news. The bad news is that we pay a monthly premium of $1,200 per month. That’s more than our house payment was and consumes a third of our retirement income. Of course that is for 85% coverage, we also pick up the rest of that as well.
I’m hoping my heart valve holds out long enough until I am Medicare age. If I need to have it replaced prior to that the deductibles and unpaid costs will pretty much sop up our remaining assets. For all the gnashing of teeth we heard about the horrors of the impending Obama health care initiative, I can’t say that I see anything in it for me one way or the other.
Rain, I can’t speak to the incidence of whooping cough, but according to CDC 2008 Trends in Tuberculosis the incidence of tuberculosis declined in the U.S. and in California through 2008. 60% of new cases were among foreign-born patients with the most cases among those born in Mexico and the highest incidence among Asian-born immigrants. Personally I have questions about all of that because many of my Asian-born sailors had received BCG immunizations as children which results in a positive test for TB exposure.
Robert, I personally think we blew it when the Administration didn’t press for a public insurance option this time. We missed the best opportunity we’re likely to have for awhile to eliminate the 15-20% of premiums going to commercial insurance plans for “administration.” I think you’re right though; if we already had decent insurance we didn’t get much from the new programs.