Thursday, September 23, 2010

Now it starts ...

Some elements of health care reform kick in today. For the vast majority of us who still don't understand it (most everyone I know), here's an effort to explain from the Kaiser Family Foundation. This has been all over the net, but if you still haven't run it, you probably should. It is informative.

Perhaps the most important point here is that this ungainly reform is of a piece -- you can't kill off the parts you hate and expect to keep the parts you like. In order to stop insurance companies from dumping sick people and refusing them coverage, you have to have a near universal mandate for people to buy health insurance, for example.

Or so "experts" insist. There probably was a more direct solution that "experts" couldn't see, such as driving the insurance companies out of business, taxing rich people, and offering single payer heath coverage as a form of "Medicare for all." But we couldn't have that because the rich and comfortable own too many of our politicians.

So we get this. This is better than what we have had. How much better will depend on how well enforced its provisions are, since we can count on medical and insurance profiteers to try to squeeze every dime out of sick people. If we want it to work, we need a government that wants to enforce the regulations, so we better defend even marginally defensible Democrats ... how tiresome.

No comments: