I'm having trouble about so much congressional opposition to a national health care plan with a government option. I am having so much heartburn over this because such a plan already exists. In fact, it has existed for years.
This is plan utilizing local clinics for everyone with full-time doctors you may access anytime you wish for a modest annual fee. Other costs, if any, are at government expense, much like Medicare today.
This is not assembly-line medicine either. It is the best of care, where doctors spend plenty of time with each patient to get to know them and their health conditions and concerns. The plan provides excellent primary care medicine with thorough examinations and focuses on preventative medicine for the long-term well-being of its patients. Specialists of all kinds are readily available when needed. In other words, it is an ideal plan and one we can all wish we had.
"If you had, for example, prostate cancer, you would go to one of the centers of excellence for the country, which would be Johns Hopkins. If you had coronary artery disease, we would engage specialists at the Cleveland Clinic. You would go to the best care in the country. And, for the most part, nobody asked what your insurance was" says Dr. Eduardo Balbona, a Jacksonville, Florida internist who once worked as a staff physician for the plan.
The plan is currently available at an unbelievably low annual cost of $503 per individuals, with the rest of the costs being picked up by the US government. But, the trouble is, this plan is not very well known. In fact, the managers of this plan refuse to discuss it, and have not returned phone calls from journalists who wished to inquire about the details. And, the users of this plan say little about it. When TV personality Dr. Timothy Johnson of ABC made a personal visit to the man in charge, he was asked to leave. Requests by ABC News to tour facilities were denied due to 'security sensitivities'.
How can this be so with a federal government's government option health care plan?
The short answer is this plan is simply not available to most Americans. Only
members of Congress enjoy this plan. Maybe they feel guilty about it and simply wish you did not know the details. That might be your two state senators and all the congressional representatives of your state, who currently enjoy exactly such a plan and regularly make use of it - at our expense. They seem to feel it is OK for them, for not for the rest of us.
Simply put, our elected politicians apparently feel they have the inherent right to enjoy - at out expense - something which many of them deny for anyone else. And, if we don't rise up in righteous and furious indignation to demand this be changed, on pain of their being drawn and quartered, we don't have a hair on our collective asses! There should be no favored classes in a democracy. Period.
Say some believe we shouldn't have government health care. OK, so demand the politicians dispense with theirs. Or, say some feel there should be equal health care for everyone. So, those demand that if it's a government plan, let everyone qualify for exactly the same thing. Nothing more, nothing less.
Let Congress know how you feel!
No surprises here!
ReplyDelete