Krugman Explains Health Care Basics

In every advanced country -- except the US -- there is public health care. This is viewed as an essential government service. But not in America. In America, public health care is viewed as "socialist" and some evil that will destroy the heart and soul of man. Better to let a person and their family end up indigent, homeless, and starving than to let the evil of public insurance give them protection from unexpected medical problems. That is the logic of the right wing fanatics in America.

Here is a bit from a post by Krugman on his NY Times blog explaining, yet again, the basics of public health care. I've bolded the key bits:

Given that House Republicans are going to pass the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Law Act this week, I thought it might be useful to remind readers about how Obamacare/Romneycare is supposed to work.


Start with the basic point: modern medicine requires that people have health insurance. Why? Because in any given year, most people have modest medical expenses – but a minority will have expenses that ordinary families couldn’t possibly pay for out of their current income. The only way to protect against the risk of such expenses is with insurance.

But the health insurance market for individuals has never worked. If the market is left loosely regulated, as it is in California, insurance companies devote large resources to determining who really needs health care, so as not to provide it; this both leads to huge administrative costs and leaves anyone with a chronic condition, or in fact anything that hints at possible trouble, out in the cold. If the state instead imposes community rating, as in New York – that is, if insurers are required to offer the same terms to anyone, regardless of medical history – you get caught in an “adverse selection death spiral”, in which healthy people don’t buy insurance, meaning that rates reflect the expenses of the unhealthy, which drives out even more healthy people, etc..

So what do we do? One answer is government-provided insurance. It’s a little-known fact that Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs like veterans’ care already pay significantly more American medical bills than private insurance.

There is much more in his post, go read the whole thing.

I find it odd that American corporations complain that having to pay health benefits makes them uncompetitive with the rest of the world. You would think these corporations would unleash their lobbyists to battle it out with the health industry lobbyists and that the corporate lobby would win: legislators would get far money under the table payola to support "Obamacare" than they would to block it. But corporations are sitting on their hands. So the rabid right is frothing at the mouth about "socialist" Obama and his attempt to legislate away the "right" for families to end up penniless, homeless, and starving because somebody got a dread disease requiring serious hospital expenses.

Opinion on "Obamacare" is changing. From a Yahoo! news report about an Associated Press-GfK poll:

The poll finds that 40 percent of those surveyed said they support the law, while 41 percent oppose it. Just after the November congressional elections, opposition stood at 47 percent and support was 38 percent.

As for repeal, only about one in four say they want to do away with the law completely. Among Republicans support for repeal has dropped sharply, from 61 percent after the elections to 49 percent now.

Given enough time, Americans will come to love their public health care like all other citizens of developed nations. The only tragedy is that Obama did a compromise which seriously weakens what could have been a solid health insurance program by giving it to the private medical insurance companies who are fighting him tooth-and-nail to stop it. Talk about "biting the hand that feeds you!"

Oh... and one final bit from the Krugman post. This is a bit of historical arcana which very few know:

Harry Truman almost pulled it [government health insurance] off in 1947, but was defeated by a coalition of the AMA and racists who didn’t want integrated hospitals

Thank the Dixiecrats for 60+ years of suffering by the poor. The radical right has always believed "better dead then red" and as far as health "better dead than insured".