Should the plan for healthcare reform have the public option or not, and why?

TARP reform will solve every problem you just stated. A public plan will just make it worse.

You can’t get that health insurance because you have a liver disease (hypothetically). It wouldn’t be profitable to the insurance company to pay for your regular checkups from the get go.

Why can’t you just get catastrophic health insurance? Because the GOVERNMENT REQUIRES that they cover the regular checkups. Change that, problem solved. Government needs to back off. It can’t solve problems it creates.

I don’t see how TARP reform solves the problem of me not currently having insurance through my job nor being able to afford insurance now. A public plan will ensure that I receive medical care period.

I would agree that we need the public option so that people who would normally wait until they’re very sick to seek help (usually in the emergency room) can see a doctor sooner and thus even help lower the overall cost of healthcare (as a check-up is not as expensive as a visit to the emergency room). Politically speaking, I don’t know how many more votes a bill without a public option will gain than a bill with the public option.

The real issue, I believe, requires a more holistic approach though. If Americans continue to be as unhealthy as we are now, government intervention will only help so much.

@SuckaFreeCitizen (That’s why it’s so expensive)

How can ANYONE give an opinion about ANYTHING related to the Obama Healthcare Reform when no one knows anything about the details?

Why do I think, when he says we can “stay with private insurance”, he means “if you pay for it yourself”?

When employers know the public option exists, why should they pay for private insurance anymore?

When I was employed, I was making too much money to get Medicaid ($24,000/year), but too little to buy insurance, so I went without. Eventually, I quit my job, got Medicaid, went nuts fixing all of the problems that had piled up, and waited until I had treated everything before going back to work.

Fast forward to three years later, and it was the same deal. I hadn’t been to a doctor in years and I was having problems that were getting significantly worse, until I had an episode that really cost me. I ended up quitting again to get Medicaid and go get treatment again (those months of waiting for Medicaid to kick in were torture).

No one should have to wait until their health problems become unmanageable to seek medical attention. People who would allow other people to go through this are heartless.

A public option is the only option which makes sense. Currently, we have a health care system where nearly 50 million people have no insurance, 14,000 more a day lose their health insurance, 17,000 people a week file bankruptcy because of unpaid medical bills, 22,000 people a year die because of inadequate care and for profit insurance companies have a financial incentive to try to find ways to deny paying for claims of people who have paid for their insurance premiums. Small businesses are dropping insurance coverage left and right because insurance premiums have become too expensive. One out of every six dollars spent is spent on health care, and the average insurance policy for a family costs $1,200 a month. There are 400+ medical conditions for which insurance companies will refuse you coverage (or charge you sky high rates) because they are considered pre-existing conditions.

Meanwhile, the insurance companies spend 22% of all their income on overhead, and still run profits in the tens of millions of dollars a year range. Which is why they are currently spending $14 million a DAY to block health care reform and to scare people into thinking there will be Obama death panels when the government decides not to cover certain people (such as the elderly or developmentally disabled), when in reality, reform seeks to make it ILLEGAL to refuse to pay for medically necessary care for ANYONE, and private insurers are convening their own death panels on a daily basis right now, wherein they meet to decide how they are going to refuse to cover treatment for various subscribers.

The facts about a public option are this…it would essentially be an expansion of Medicare, a program which runs with about 3% overhead expense right now and which guarantees everyone on it the ability to see their own doctors whenever they need to. This would be available to anyone, which means people who don’t have insurance or people who have access to insurance that is too expensive. This option would be made affordable, and for profit companies would have to streamline, run more efficiently and cover more things. Without this option, there is nothing to compete with private insurance, at least nothing meaningful, and there would be nothing to stop them from putting profit in front of doing the right thing for their subscribers. If you have an insurance option which is concerned with doing the right thing instead of doing the thing that makes the most money, you have an honest system which helps people. Without a private option, the plan would be severely weakened.

And please don’t buy into the argument that a public option is the first step on a slippery slope to “socialized medicine”. First and foremost, the countries who do have some form of socialized insurance or some form of actual socialized are (Europe, Scandanavia, even Canada) have costs per person on average of ½ of what US costs are, and no one EVER worries that a) they won’t be treated or b) they will go broke if they get something taken care of. And every one of these countries ranks higher on the World Health Organization’s scale of best medical systems (we’re #37, or were in 2000, an things have gotten MUCH worse since then…we are behind many 3rd world countries on this list). But the deal is this, even those countries STILL have private healthcare as an option. And the next thing to realize is that, if the public option is not cheaper and better than the private option, there is no way it’s going to put private insurance out of business. Since the same people who are going to argue that a public option is a slippery slope that will lead to socialized medicine are the SAME people who argue that private industry can do ANYTHING more efficiently than the government, the logic doesn’t add up. And consider why you’re seeing people all freaked out that somehow we’re gong to force euthanasia on old people…that’s patently ridiculous, but remember that $14 million a day being spent to kill reform? Well, they’ll say whatever they have to in order to get people up in arms to reject this, because a public option will severely hamper their profits, but the main reason they’re not spending that $14 million a day on a campaign of facts which contrast cons against the pros that are self evident is that they KNOW if they try to debate the FACTS, they will lose. The vitriol of the opposition should make it self evident to anyone that this is a good idea.

A public option is absolutely necessary. It is the first step in fixing your ridiculously broken health “care” system. Honestly, no one in the rest of the civilized world knows what a “pre-existing condition” is nor does it have any impact whatsoever on how we receive medical treatment.

As I have said in other threads, the concept of health insurance is a trick to deceive you. Unlike the odds of your car being stolen or your house burning down, everyone WILL get sick or need health care eventually, thus your insurance companies have to, in order to make a profit and stay in business, either have the most awesome and efficient health care possible, or simply take in more money than they give out by means of denying claims. Guess which one goes on nowadays.

The public option is the big hammer that will make the rest of the reforms viable. Without it, nothing will change. That’s what the Republicans are counting on. Here’s an interesting piece:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603854_pf.html

Obama and the Democratic leaders need to round up all of the Democrats in Congress who are opposed to the bill and lay out the facts for them: the Republicans are circling like a pack of hungry wolves, slavering at the prospect of bringing down the Democrats with another failed health care reform, just like they did in 1994. They’ve pulled out all the stops. They have their hate & fear machine running on overdrive, with no concern about the collateral damage to ordinary Americans if they kill this bill. If the bill passes, the Republican Party as we know it will die. If the bill fails, the so-called Blue Dogs might keep their seats, but all hope of health care reform will die for another generation.

@pikipupiba I believe TARP reform could be one of the ways to allocate funds for the public option, but it certainly did not cause the problem. This dysfunctional healthcare system and it’s lack of accessibility has been a long standing problem long before that program came into existence 2008. It’s rediculous to think that will solve everything in one fell swoop.

Most of the people who are against the public option are so because a) they are greedy b) they are apathetic to those who are suffering because of this failed healthcare system and c) they are afraid that this will be the first step towards the United States becoming a socialist/communist country. What they fail to realize is that the propagation of this ideology is nothing but tool of control. Think about it. After 9/11, people were foolishly convinced the Patriot Act was a bright idea. Now, they want to screw themselves out of affordable healthcare for everyone? Protesters that are employees of and funded by fear-mongering special interest groups are in townhall meetings and rallies creating hysteria amongst those who are too lazy and too gullible to find out the truth for themselves.

I think the biggest problem right now in getting anything done about this matter is the lack of education about the facts, not to mention greed and indifference toward the fellow man in general. No one ever gets around to the facts of the matter because all these nonsensical red-herrings get thrown up in the process, making a discussion about what’s more important, like developing a comprehensive approach to the problem of healthcare, ever elusive.