If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.
It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”
Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats’ plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.
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George Will Sunday gave New York Times columnist Paul Krugman a much-needed lesson on what happens if ObamaCare is passed.
Krugman wrote a piece Friday accusing Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) of lying at Thursday's healthcare summit about premiums going up if the Democrats' plan is enacted.
During the Roundtable segment of Sunday's "This Week," Will pointed out, "You said in the next sentence in your column, "I guess you could say he wasn't technically lying because the Congressional Budget Office says that's true."
Krugman responded by explaining that even though "the average payments go up," many people will receive better coverage.
To this inanity, Will marvelously asked Krugman if the government forced him to buy a more expensive car, but told him it's not really more expensive because it's a better car, "Wouldn't you tell them to get off your land?"
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For more than 60 years, our elected leaders have ignored the destructive profiteering by the health care and insurance industry. Nationally, more than 45,000 Americans die every year and thousands more go bankrupt due to these out-of-control health care costs.
The Health Reform Bill, which is now before Congress, is a good start to reversing this trend. The prescription drug "donut hole" that corporate lobbyists inserted into Medicare Part D will be reduced and eventually eliminated. No one should have to choose between food or medicine. Benefits will include cancer screenings at no cost and seniors can keep their doctors.
Small businesses will no longer face sudden, arbitrary rate hikes and the national disgrace of seriously ill people being thrown off the insurance rolls will end.
There are many excellent reform measures in this bill, with preventive care being key to its success. Much more needs to be done, but we must encourage our leaders to pass health care reform now so we can get on with our lives.
Elaine Hornal
Waialua
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The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.
Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.
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The Star-Bulletin should spend a little more time on fact-checking statements in news articles and letters to editors. For example:
Statement: 45,000 die yearly because they have no medical insurance. False: Results from a 2005 Harvard study were widely discredited by peer review and were proven to be statistically invalid.
Statement: The U.S. health care system is rated seventh in the world. False: Study by the U.N. World Health Organization was skewed by false data and multiple subjective valuations that had nothing to do with health care quality while ignoring many favorable factors where U.S. health care is superior, i.e. cancer survivor rates, doctor/patient ratios, treatment availability.
Statement: Government regulations have resulted in shorter careers for physicians and shorter work weeks. True: Since the early 1980s the Department of Labor has reported the U.S. government changes to medical school admission requirements have directly resulted in a decline in the number of years physicians spend in practice and the hours worked per week.
Ken Welch
Mililani
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