President Obama: Rhetoric over Reform

President Obama is doing what this blog predicted: Checklists. Look what we've done. And as previously addressed, doing something is NOT always better than doing nothing. Last night his healthcare words were as follows:

"Given these facts, we can no longer afford to put healthcare reform on hold.

Already, we have done more to advance the cause of healthcare reform in the last 30 days than we have in the last decade. When it was days old, this Congress passed a law to provide and protect health insurance for 11 million American children whose parents work full-time. Our recovery plan will invest in electronic health records and new technology that will reduce errors, bring down costs, ensure privacy and save lives. It will launch a new effort to conquer a disease that has touched the life of nearly every American by seeking a cure for cancer in our time. And it makes the largest investment ever in preventive care, because that is one of the best ways to keep our people healthy and our costs under control.

This budget builds on these reforms. It includes an historic commitment to comprehensive healthcare reform - a down-payment on the principle that we must have quality, affordable healthcare for every American. It's a commitment that's paid for in part by efficiencies in our system that are long overdue. And it's a step we must take if we hope to bring down our deficit in the years to come.

Now, there will be many different opinions and ideas about how to achieve reform, and that is why I'm bringing together businesses and workers, doctors and health care providers, Democrats and Republicans to begin work on this issue next week.

I suffer no illusions that this will be an easy process. It will be hard. But I also know that nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our healthcare has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough. So let there be no doubt: healthcare reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year. "

Our questions for the President remain the same. Why does Obama continue to ignore the pink elephant in the living room: eg. Government employee benefits programs, in part supported by taxpayer dollars that far exceed any benefits package available to average Americans in access, affordability and quality of medical services available under the plans? There is no reason to ignore these handouts to civil servants, a population that will grow under Obama's leadership. The disparity between average citizen and civil servant benefits programs has made civil servants the new middle class, ahead of their private sector counterparts.

Why are we being bamboozled by wait and see rhetoric with promises that Obama will speak to the same old stakeholders with the same old exclusion of CONSUMERS? Telling Americans to wait while he assembles BUSINESSES (who want to offer no health insurance to employees) and insurance companies (who want to provide the least coverage for the highest premiums), DOCTORS (who support all programs that help guarantee their continued salaries, with increases) and HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS whose interests are overlapped with physician interests, Obama, like those who came before him is LEAVING OUT THE CONSUMER. While Obama has an almost pathological resistance to acknowledging things that have been tried and failed before, arguing instead that his approach is different, his approach is not different. Catering to business, physicians and health services providers is the SAME, not different and expecting different results from doing the same thing...that's the definition of insanity.

Why is Obama parading out his own pet project of technology as a positive action taken on behalf of health care reform? These technology advances do nothing for consumers. The "savings" they anticipate are NOT FOR CONSUMERS. There are no provisions that savings be passed onto consumers, NONE. They promise savings for health insurers who can now require that insureds report on themselves, thereby further eroding any myth of patient privacy when it comes to obtaining insurance coverage, thereby again leading to the obvious question as to why we perpetuate the wastefulness of HIPAA. Technology promises savings for health services providers. But for consumers? No. And of course, consumers are left out of the "studies" Obama promises.

Why is President Obama peddling "preventive care," which has long been the distraction used by health INSURERS as a means of exchanging coverage that is INSURANCE, covering the RISK OF THE COST OF ILLNESS, for the finite costs of checkups and screenings that leave individuals facing bankruptcy in the event they actually need medical CARE after such screenings? Our health "crisis" has been fueled by blaming people who actually need assistance in paying for needed medical care. Health insurers and their lobbyists have successfully turned consumers against one another in this area, arguing that the sick are costing them money. Well, yeah, and if people weren't getting sick they wouldn't need to pay for health insurance because insurance is what we buy hoping we won't need it, and insurance is what is sold hoping we won't need it. It is only when there is an event of illness that we realize that consumers and their insurance companies are "ADVERSARIES" in this relationship.

and finally, we must ask ourselves what kind of change can occur from a President who uses the rhetoric of acknowledging that our civil servants are supposed to serve the American people but whose actions promise continued catering to bureaucracies of big business, lobbyists and his fellow government peers? This is more than a philosophical question. The shift from a free market as some are apt to call the consumer/producer relationship to a relationship that ignores consumers except for using their money to maintain an established system is the key to our health care crisis. Free markets mean that consumers purchase insurance if they get what they want which is coverage of RISK of financial ruin from health crises. The shift to health insurers picking and choosing to whom they will sell their product based on who promises the highest profit margin (obviously the healthy) has created an environment where we are begging insurers to please sell us a policy...any policy if we've had the nerve to actually be sick at any time in our lives. This is the ridiculous byproduct of an industry that has maintained itself by exploiting its own greed through the manipulation of government and policy through its lobbyists. Similarly, physicians, who we HIRE to treat us for illness also have used this shift to threaten not to take on patients in a given class (such as Medicare) UNLESS they get more government dollars. Obama is repackaging the same and calling it CHANGE and that is deception.