{"id":850,"date":"2009-10-07T14:20:09","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T14:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/10\/health-insurance-and-the-public-option.html"},"modified":"2009-10-07T14:20:09","modified_gmt":"2009-10-07T14:20:09","slug":"health-insurance-and-the-public-option","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/10\/health-insurance-and-the-public-option.html","title":{"rendered":"Health Insurance and the Public Option"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jerry Kolber is a writer, filmmaker and television producer based in New York City. His personal site is at www.JerryKolber.com <\/a>and you can follow him on Twitter<\/a>. Past projects include Inked and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and he is currently producing Bank of Mom and Dad, airing on Soapnet Wednesday nights at 10PM.<\/p>\n

<\/i>I’ve been thinking a lot about health insurance lately. Not because I need it – I pay $320 a month for policy through Freelancer’s Union – but because the conversation around the issue has become so distorted and false.  There is so much wrong speech (from a Buddhist perspective) happening around health care that I am compelled to share some thoughts about it today.<\/p>\n

The proposed “Public Option” is so simple it is shocking how badly some elected officials and the health insurance companies have twisted the meaning. Simply put, the public option is just another insurance option for people who already do or do not have insurance. Just as I can now choose between HIP, Blue Cross, AETNA, or the Freelancers Union Insurance, if a public option existed I could also choose that.   That’s it.  As the name more than suggests, it is just another option.<\/p>\n

So why is this public option important? <\/p>\n


\n
In order to provide proper medical care to anyone in the country – as
\nany prosperous nation should – everyone must have health insurance. 
\nThis means that the public option would at the very least immediately
\ninclude the 15% of Americans who fall in the insurance “gap” – people
\nmaking too much money to get low-income government insurance, but not
\nenough to afford a private policy.  This is around 40,000,000 people,
\nand this would make the “public option” the largest single health
\ninsurance organization in the country.<\/p>\n

This matters because in
\norder to keep those policy costs low – which is the whole point of
\nhealth care reform – this massive, national body of health insurance
\ncustomers would give the public option immense bargaining power with
\ndrug companies, doctors and hospitals.  If the public option works, AND
\ndrives down the costs of healthcare and insurance premiums, existing
\nprivate insurance companies would have to keep up or risk losing
\ncustomers and profits – or (gasp) figure out some way to offer some
\nincentive or perk to keep customers in a more competitive market.<\/p>\n

This
\nof course terrifies the insurance companies, as it should, since they
\nare built on a profit model, not a health care model. But this is where
\nmy Buddhist perspective kicks in and the whole interdependence thing
\nstarts to chew its own tail.  Essentially, the argument against
\nintroducing a public option that could affect insurance company profits
\nis this:<\/p>\n

“We’ve spent fifty years building an insurance model
\nthat creates profits for us and our shareholders.  It’s designed on
\nonly offering insurance to people who can afford it, excluding people
\nwho really need it, and denying as many claims as possible to maximize
\nprofits. This is a system that works and we know it works because our
\ncompanies are profitable.”<\/p>\n

The problem with this logic is that
\nit leaves out the more than 40,000,000 people who cannot afford
\ninsurance.  If you are an uninsured couple with two kids making $55,000
\na year, taking home around $40,000 – health insurance will cost you
\nnearly a third of your salary.  In the last ten years, I’ve personally
\nspent $72,000 on health care as a single person. About $40,000 of that
\nwas monthly health care premiums. About $2,000 was doctor visits and
\nprescriptions.  And another $ 30,000 was tax payments to Medicare for
\ninsurance for the elderly and disabled.  I cannot account for how much
\nof my tax dollars subsidized insurance for low-income families and
\nindividuals, but some portion of my tax dollars went to that as well.<\/p>\n

Would
\nI rather spend less and insure more people? Duh.  But the fact that
\n“Spend Less, Insure More” is not acceptable to the insurance companies
\nand a large number of officials elected to represent the best interests of the citizens of the USA makes clear that their mandate is “Make More,
\nInsure Less”.  And they’ve done a great job using fear, racial bias,
\nand inflammatory language to convince tens of millions of Americans to
\nvocally take a stand against their own best interests.<\/p>\n

The
\npublic option isn’t welfare. It isn’t a tax. It isn’t some sort of
\ncommunist soup-kitchen health care line.  You can’t argue the fact that
\na system that provides health care options to the poor, the old, and
\nthose that make enough money, while leaving out a entire swath of
\nmiddle income earners, is broken.  Really broken.    Fixing it is both
\nright, and popular.  Unfortunately a small, vocal minority has used
\nwrong speech and the press’s insatiable desire for lurid sound bites to
\nmanipulate and control the health care message.<\/p>\n

Whoever you are, whatever you look like, however hard you work, the
\nuninsured in this country are people that look like you and work as
\nhard as you. As the only industrialized nation without Universal Health
\nCare, the United States has put itself in an amoral, if not immoral
\nposition – we can easily afford to provide affordable health care for
\nall Americans but to date we have chosen not to do so. Choosing profits
\nfor a select few over health for all says something deeply nasty about
\na nation. At least, I think it does. <\/p>\n

Wake up America.  This
\nmay be your one chance in a generation for America to join the rest of
\nthe developed world in having an entire nation of citizens who don’t go
\nto bed at night worried about what might happen if they get sick.  If
\nwe are to be taken seriously in the coming decades as a nation with any
\nsense of morality and decency, it is time to put our insurance
\ncompanies money where our collective mouth is and get the ball rolling
\non healthcare and justice for all.  <\/p>\n

So here’s the action,
\nsince the Interdependence Project is all about taking your practice
\nofff the cushion – and this is an easy one that anyone can do in five
\nminutes or less.<\/p>\n

Unless you think it’s right that hard-working people should be priced
\nout of insurance, please call, email, or write your representative and
\nthe White House and tell them you support the public option.  You can
\nfind your representative by zip code here<\/a>. And you can email the Preisdent here<\/a>, call him at 202-456-1111, TTY for the hearing impaired at 202-456-6213 or write him at
The White House
\n1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
\nWashington, DC 20500<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jerry Kolber is a writer, filmmaker and television producer based in New York City. His personal site is at www.JerryKolber.com and you can follow him on Twitter. Past projects include Inked and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and he is currently producing Bank of Mom and Dad, airing on Soapnet Wednesday nights at 10PM.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interdependent-activism-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nHealth Insurance and the Public Option - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/10\/health-insurance-and-the-public-option.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Health Insurance and the Public Option - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jerry Kolber is a writer, filmmaker and television producer based in New York City. 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