Health Care Reform: The Morning After

Today's guest blogger is Barbara O'Brien.  Barbara blogs about health care reform at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, and AlterNet. She has been a  panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC.
 
Many politicians and pundits warned us that the health care reform (HCR) legislation that just became law will destroy America. Government bureaucrats will take over health care decisions, we were told. The old and infirm would be hauled away by death panels. Everything about the way we receive our medical care will change, and change drastically, they said.

Medicare recipients have been frightened by stories that their benefits will be cut. Middle-age people are worried they will lose their jobs when the law’s dreaded regulations, or taxes, or maybe regulations with taxes, would destroy their employers’ businesses.

The truth is, very little will change for most people. If you were insured by employee benefits before HCR, you will be insured by exactly the same policy in exactly the same way after HCR. You will have access to the same doctors on the same terms. “Government bureaucrats” will no more be involved in your health care than they were before.

And the same is true of Medicare, which of course is a government program, although many of the people who opposed the HCR bill don’t seem to know that.

Here are the “cataclysmic” changes to health care that are now in effect, or which will go into effect within the next six months for people who are already in group insurance plans:

• The law says you can’t lose your insurance coverage because you get sick. Before, in many states, if you were stricken with a severe illness such as mesothelioma cancer that would be expensive to treat, your insurer could use just about any excuse to cancel your coverage. That is over.

• HCR has ended lifetime limits on coverage. As long as you are receiving medical care, your insurer pays the bills.

• Your children can be covered on your existing policy until they are 26 years old.

• In six months, insurers cannot refuse to insure people under the age of 19 because of “pre-existing conditions.” This provision will go into effect for everyone in 2014.

And if you are on Medicare, you will be asked to struggle with the following:You get a free annual checkup.

The co-pays and deductibles on many preventive care services are eliminated.If you are in the Medicare D “doughnut hole,” you will get a $250 rebate check in a few weeks. The hole itself will be closed gradually and will be gone by 2020.

But what about all those terrible regulations and taxes that are about to drive businesses out of business? Um, there really isn’t much to report. Oh, wait, here’s one — a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning services that use ultraviolet lamps will go into effect July 1. That’s about it.

However, beginning this year a tax credit will be available for some small businesses to help provide insurance coverage for employees.

Soon the politicians and pundits will start trying to frighten you about the provisions that will go into effect after this year. I assure you they are about as scary as the provisions that go into effect this year, but I will discuss them in a follow-up post...

Bill Clinton warns against political rhetoric getting out of control...

Distributor Cap explains capital gains...

National Day of Silence...

A Short History of the Health Care Debate

Franklin Roosevelt identified health care as a right, but never pushed for it. Harry Truman campaigned for a government program, but it was under Dwight Eisenhower that employers began to offer health insurance as a tax-free benefit.


John Kennedy introduced the initial Medicare legislation, which did not pass. Notice that he compares the American health care system unfavorably to those in Europe.






Harry Truman was the first president to actively champion universal health care. Although it was a central part of his epic 1948 campaign, Truman never proposed actual legislation. Members of his administration devised the original concept of Medicare, and in 1965, Truman became the first American to enroll in the program:


Richard Nixon's health care plan, though not passed, changed the terms of the debate from government-driven universal care to general access through the private insurance system, the approach eventually adopted by President Obama. Don't miss the closing remarks in this video.


Bill Clinton, as ever conversant in policy matters, summarizes the pros and cons of different approaches to universal health care. Clinton's own attempt at health care reform collapsed under attacks from the health insurance industry and a unified Republican opposition. Ironically, one Republican alternative featured the mandates that the party later decried as socialism when proposed by Barack Obama.


March 23, 2010: Barack Obama signs health care reform into law 62 years after Harry Truman made the first serious proposal to guarantee health care to all Americans:


Mercy and old City Park oaks near Marconi and Harrison...

Whitman, as Whitman would have wanted (thanks, Editilla)...

HBD to JMG...


Turbulent April...

Harry Truman campaigning for president in 1948:

The Irrational "Hatred" of George Bush

Conservative blogs and columnists often refer to the "left's" irrational hatred of President Bush. (The "left" being anyone who reads The New York Times.) The left, according to these writers, actually want America to fail in Iraq so that Bush won't succeed, regardless of what that implies for American servicemen and women. (The left's supposed abhorrence of the United States military makes this especially palatable.) I've actually read such things. 

I had set all of this aside as one of those mysteries of the conservative mind that I would never grasp. I mean, plainly the idea that I or anyone else would hope for death and dismemberment of anyone in order to spite George Bush is outlandish, but they regard it as typical liberal degeneracy. However, my recent prowling of conservative blogs raised this matter again to the point that I'm starting to understand where they are coming from (a scary prospect, I admit).

The ironic or hypocritical or just plain odd aspect of all this is that the right does have what many of us perceive as an irrational hatred of Bill Clinton. So why should they get their drawers in a knot if we detest George Bush? Sauce for the goose, correct? But the labyrinthine ways of the conservative mentality doesn't see it that way. And there is a certain weird logic to their thinking as I've come to understand it.

The right saw Bill Clinton as a lying, draft-dodging, adulterous Democrat who usurped the throne of Ronald Reagan and commenced the dismantling of the shining city on the hill. They found him morally unworthy to be president, particularly commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Clinton was so unworthy that no tactic with the goal of bringing him down was off limits. In fact, not only was no tactic unjustified, the threat to the country and the military was so acute as to demand extreme rhetoric and action. Their frustration and hatred grew with Clinton's popularity; it culminated when they could not convince the rest of the country that impeachment and removal from office was a necessary and justifiable consequence of his personal shortcomings.

Since their hatred of Clinton was personal, they assume that liberals (a) must hate George Bush and (b) that it must be personal. As they did not with Bill Clinton, conservatives perceive George Bush as a good and decent man who wants to do the right thing. (I can quarrel with that, but the point is their perception, not mine.) Ergo liberal hatred of Bush is not only personal and extreme, it is -- unlike their hatred of Clinton -- irrational. That I don't care what George Bush does when the lights are low never figures into the calculus.

There was a time when I could say that while I had no personal feelings toward George Bush one way or another, I did hate what he was doing to the country. I drew a disctinction between despising Bush personally and despising his policies. However, Bush and the right's own actions have created a climate of personal animosity between Americans based largely on their perception of him. It was George Bush, after all, who made support of his Iraq policy synonymous with "supporting the troops": If you didn't support the war, you didn't support the troops, and what kind of person did that make you? It was conservatives who equated opposition to the war with cut-and-run cravenness, thus accusing millions of Americans of moral cowardice. Who wouldn't take that personally and resent it?

So, yes, I admit it: I have come to detest George Bush personally. He used 9/11 as a means to consolidate and exercise power and to impugn the patriotism of millions of Americans. He identified our country and therefore me as an American with words like "torture" and "rendition." His performance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina amounts to dereliction of duty. His contempt for public opinion, which he masks by claiming to do what he thinks -- what he knows -- is right for America, provokes public contempt for him. As for rooting for Bush to fail, well, he's done that on his own without any help from me.