Obama health care is wrong

Dear editor:

I listened to the president's address to the joint session of Congress, and it sounded like politics as usual.

Under these so-called reform bills, we are being asked for another bailout. Instead of the banks, or Wall Street, or auto companies, this will rescue pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies. These are companies like Pfizer, which agreed to pay $68 billion to buy out Wyeth earlier this year and last week admitted to a felony and agreed to pay $2.3 billion in fines. Insurers are not much better, Blue Cross/Blue Shield has to have its own National Anti-Fraud Department to keep up with the corruption within their own systems.

Health care reform opponents like to tell us that most people already have coverage, but 675,000 Americans who had health insurance when they first got sick filed for bankruptcy in 2008 due to medical costs. Their insurance companies let them down. With the rise in unemployment, we can expect worse numbers this year. Jobless folks can't afford insurance premiums.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who has dealt with the problems of poverty in America will tell you that the really poor people can't file for bankruptcy. It costs too much!

The way insurers increase profits is by getting premiums from healthy people and refusing coverage to sick people. They deny payment and shift costs onto patients. They lobby for public subsidies like Medicare HMO plans, and they pay for re-election campaigns so politicians are afraid to oppose them.

Phamaceuticals are not much better. They have the federal government so tied up in knots that it's illegal for Medicare to bargain for lower prices. That's why you can pay less at WalMart for prescriptions than the government pays the drug companies.

So now we have plans to expand profits by compelling another 47 million citizens to buy health insurance. Those who can't afford it will draw on taxpayer dollars to subsidize premiums -- well, gee, we can't ask the companies to pay for them. And, guess what? That's still going to leave millions of Americans without adequate insurance.

Meanwhile, in Congress, we have competing 2,000-page bills full of political doubletalk. None of these monster bills do anything to address the real problems of average Americans. I've heard the debate compared to arguing over whether aspirin or ibuprofen is better to treat cancer.

There's an alternative to all this, of course, but you're not hearing much about it. The Speaker of the House has promised an up-or-down vote to the Weiner Amendment that would replace all 2,000 pages of HR 3200 with the 27-page wording from HR 676. This would expand and improve Medicare to all Americans, no deductibles, co-payments, co-insurance, or other cost-sharing while paying for prescription drugs, mental health, dental, vision, chiropractic and long term care. It's paid for by monthly premiums on an income-based sliding scale, for less than most insurance premiums.

So, there is still a slight chance of getting serious reform this year, but odds are it won't happen. From what the president said, it sounds more like we will get an enormously expensive law that leaves us worse off than we were.

Jim Breslin