Krugman Tries To Explain Obama

The current battle over health care in the US is an eye-opening lesson in how the right loves to play dirty politics, the politics of lies, misdirection, and smear. You would have thought that Americans would have had enough of that from the McCarthy era. But, no, they voted in Nixon in 1968 and got the biggest political corruption scandal in US history. You would have thought that they would have learned from that, but, no, they bought Reagan's "new dawn in America" and watched him run up a deficit building up a military that was already several times bigger than any other country's and chasing a Star Wars dream that would never work. You would have thought they would have learned from that, but they didn't. They voted in GWB in 2000 and got a "war of choice, not necessity" in Iraq which cost more deaths than 9/11 and over ten times as many injured as there were dead from 9/11. For what? To get back at the dictator who tried to assassinate his daddy?

Krugman is up against that when he, once again, sits down to write an op-ed in the NY Times to explain to Americans why Obama's health care initiative is important and tries to warn the reader of all the tricks and lies coming from the Republicans:

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend.

And in their efforts to avoid “medical losses,” the industry term for paying medical bills, insurers spend much of the money taken in through premiums not on medical treatment, but on “underwriting” — screening out people likely to make insurance claims. In the individual insurance market, where people buy insurance directly rather than getting it through their employers, so much money goes into underwriting and other expenses that only around 70 cents of each premium dollar actually goes to care.

...

Right-wing opponents of reform would have you believe that President Obama is a wild-eyed socialist, attacking the free market. But unregulated markets don’t work for health care — never have, never will. To the extent we have a working health care system at all right now it’s only because the government covers the elderly, while a combination of regulation and tax subsidies makes it possible for many, but not all, nonelderly Americans to get decent private coverage.

Now Mr. Obama basically proposes using additional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us. That’s not radical; it’s as American as, well, Medicare.

Read the whole article. There is a lot more very useful, very important information in it.