The land of the free and the home of healthcare

I listened and/or watched all of President Obama's heath care diatribe last night and left with a feeling of being distinctly let down. I have said in the past that I have been skeptical of health care reform from the beginning from a purely personal and selfish reason; I have good coverage, I'm healthy (knock on wood) and feel very secure in my position and my insurance. IN fact I've always felt (and justifiably so) that I in the position that I am in would have the most to lose. This has led me to watch the ongoings with some unease and a relative amount of skepticism- to me the numbers just don't add up. How to pay for this? To me you follow the money and the obvious place to reduce costs is: drum roll please (you won't find it in the Obama plan) is Tort reform; basically medical malpractice cases. Frivolous law suits are killing the medical profession to the point where they need to be judges before they are doctors. Obstetricians are paying through the nose for insurance because of it. Place caps on the monetary compensation or reform the laws and a huge cost goes away. But that is apparently not an option.

The frightening thing to me is how this 'plan' will work. There are some holes you could drive a dinosaur through. Then there is the implementation of this 'simple' plan to create a public option to compete with private companies locked in to a sinking ship. Make no mistake any private company in this plan is doomed at some point, its just financial suicide. The only way to partly survive, they would promote the very behaviour that led us into this economic conditions. Observe; Insurance company A has some at risk people on their plan, so they look at company B and say ahh, if we lower our rates or better yet come up with some funky packaging for plans we can get more people to come over and more money to cover the at-risk people because now we legally can't drop them. We can also sell swaps where investors can essentially bet that our people will remain healthy- if they do they get a nice return. Look at all this money coming in.... this is great. And so it begins, then people get sick. Now suddenly instead of being able to cut and run the entire health insurance company is brought down, and not just one person loses their insurance but EVERYONE. A la Lehman or Bear Sterns. That sounds like a super end game for everyone. Think about it if it was a government plan. What happens when they fail?

And don't make me laugh with 'Bi-partisanship' -that was as a pundit said "A declaration of war." but that's for another day.