Health Care? What Health Care?

Whatever happened to health care reform? We’re capturing Taliban big shots in Pakistan; we’re all watching the Olympics (are we?); sitting Senators are dropping like flies; Republicans are beginning to salivate—especially if they’re to the right of Goldwater.
I didn’t vote for Obama; I didn’t care much for most of his positions but I did think he might actually do something to upgrade our healthcare system. That got me momentarily excited. I’ve been waiting for that ever since my dad told me that the medical profession forced most bankruptcies in this country—way back in the 1950s.
It’s still true. And when it comes to the great squeaks and squawks from the Right about how I would lose my choice and we’d lose medical efficiency if the government got involved (single payer) in our health care—whooooo hah!
Oh my. There is no imaginable way my medical care could be less efficient if the government were involved than my private insurance has proven to be in the past few weeks. Oh me. It seems that the retirement people who service my account decided to change prescription plans on me at the beginning of this year.
It has taken me six weeks to get all my prescriptions straightened out. There are some that I now cannot order for more than a month (more co-pays, goodie, goodie). Others will require “prior authorization” with the new company.
But, I am assured, if we had a single payer that went on handling my prescriptions on the same basis, year after year, things would be vastly more inefficient (and aggravating). Nuts. It couldn’t possibly be. My wife has found a discount store where she can get her one prescription for about the equivalent of one of my co-pays. She doesn’t plan to involve insurance at all.
The present system is madness. Each medical practice has to have several people in a back office madly sorting out fifty or sixty different insurance plans. Tell me that doesn’t cost the patient money. And my pharmacy has a huge list of prescription plans—and they just spent long minutes on the phone for me trying to straighten my new one out.
My former prescription plan was dropped because it was deemed too expensive. The new one costs less and is far more hassle. And far more co-pays. For me there is no perceivable benefit. There is no single payer saying to the enormously profitable pharmaceutical companies, “This is all you can charge.”
Or to the medical equipment suppliers, “You cannot charge patients over one hundred dollars for a device that costs you under ten.” Oh, what a bill of goods the American people have been sold by those who make money off their health care!
The Democrats, looking forward to this fall’s elections, shuddering at the angry tea party rants (held by people who seem not to realize that Medicare is basically a single payer governmental program that seems to make Right Wingers very happy), are backing off the whole issue of health care reform.
Let’s admit they screwed it up from the outset. The Bible, with all its ruels, only comes in at a few pages over a thousand—and it took over a thousand years to write—about a page a year. In a single year, Democrats—and Obama—created a monstrosity with over 2,000 pages.
And now they’re walking away from it. Pretending it isn’t there. I guess I can’t blame them—it’s hard to find another job with as many perks as a Congressman gets. I’ve waited for sane health care for over half a century. Guess I’ll have to keep waiting.
Now I have no reason left for liking Obama. Honestly.