This is Obama’s Plan – Now, Vote on It

This is what Obama says that the healthcare bill on the table does for people.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/health-care-meeting

I support the passage of this legislation as soon as possible. I can only afford catastrophic health insurance with a $1,000 deductible because I am self-employed and starting a new small business. That means I can’t just go to the doctor if I’m sick because it’ll cost $75. I can’t get prescriptions, not the brand names, because they can cost hundreds of dollars a pill. This is very immediate for me, personally. If they pass this, I’ll be able to buy insurance as though I worked for a company with thousands of employees, instead of canceling a policy purchased as an individual family that cost more than $2,000 a month. They won’t be able to deny me coverage for a pre-existing back condition.

Honestly, I would prefer socialized medicine. I would prefer that medical care was seen the same as fire departments. In cities, we pay for fire departments through our taxes. In the country, they get grants donations and the firemen are volunteers. But if the firetruck comes to your house to put out a fire, they don’t give you a bill for the thousands of dollars that it cost. We share that cost as a social unit, either through voluntary contributions or through taxation. Either way, every town and city has a fire department, thanks to Benjamin Franklin’s idea (He also invented the public library system. Talk about socialist!) Or, I could say I want it like the road system. If you drive, you buy gas and you pay the transportation tax. That tax is used to fund the federal highway administration, which pays for the interstate highway system. Or, you pay it in property taxes and the city or town in which you live pays for the roads. In other places, they take a toll to pay for the maintenance. (Though, the highways and roads totally tell you where you can and can’t go, don’t they? Socialists! Why can’t you just drive through people’s back yards if you want? Stupid government and its laws!)

Our heroes are police and firefighters and astronauts and the military. These are all public servants who are paid for by the taxes that we pay. We hold them in the highest esteem because they hold themselves to higher standards than we do in the private sector. I want to add doctors to that list. We don’t think of them as heroes, do we? We think of them as rich. What if we thought of them as people who were devoted to the best care they could provide, the same as the Navy Seals.

Economically, the more people that are in the pool of insured, the less it costs, because the risk is shared by many. The argument is that the government shouldn’t run it. Well, the thing is that if it’s not a government or a non-profit, then the goal isn’t healthcare anymore, it’s profit. That’s the whole point of for-profit companies. That’s “their whole got-dam’d raison-etre.”

There nothing in here that says the government is going to tell you what your healthcare has to be. You can always buy whatever the hell you want. Just pay for it all on your own at the price they will charge you. And pay for your own abortions.

I want the government to run the system through which I purchase my healthcare, because it saves me money and they’ll be making sure everyone gets it right, like the firefighters. I hear the VA is really good, though they did get caught with some deteriorating facilities a few years ago. How long did it take before private nursing homes were held accountable for the deaths through neglect? When the VA got caught, everything changed like that *snap*. That doesn’t seem to be what’s going on with the banking system now. I have had far fewer problems with the government, including the MVA than I have with my health insurance companies or my bank over the years.

It really is about what I think works, instead of a hackneyed ideology. I do not believe that the water coming into my house would be safe if it was run by private industry or through my own control. Wells are contaminated all the time and the homeowners don’t test their water as much as the City of Baltimore does. I know my water is clean. The EPA checks on the City of Baltimore to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to. The City of Baltimore keeps meticulous records of their testing. And, I have confidence that my water is clean. i pay a much lower fee for that than if I had to buy water.

But, unfortunately, that’s not in the healthcare reform. What is in there is an insurance exchange where insurance companies compete across state lines, a ban on the denial of care for pre-existing conditions, funding for more people to get insurance. The market would not be able to sustain employer-provided healthcare for very long. The costs are rising too quickly. The exchange is what will replace it and employers will contribute an amount to help off-set costs. It’s not socialized medicine, but it’s a start.

So, that is why I hope that the Congress of the United States gets it shit together and passes healthcare reform. If they don’t, and anything happens to me or my family, I’ll be asking for a handout from those people who are working against this bill.