Obama and Health Care: Will Real Change Happen This Time
A major campaign promise made by Bill Clinton during the 1992 Presidential campaign was to provide affordable health care coverage for everyone. Within a year the health care industry would lobby Congress hard to defeat the universal health care style plan that was being proposed.
Since that time the state of health care has changed considerably with the number of uninsured rising and health care costs going up at a staggering rate.
According to the Centers for American Progress the number of Americans who have no health insurance has risen by 4 million in just a little over a year, bringing the total number of uninsured up to 47 million nationwide. In an effort to fight this problem President Obama is laying out a number of plans to provide affordable health care for everyone.
The first step on the road to reform occurred just a few weeks ago with the expansion of the State Children Health Insurance Program.
Now Obama is proposing spending $150 billion on improving the state of American health care. One proposal includes: doing a complete overhaul of the current system to force health care companies to lower costs thus lowering insurance premiums.
Another proposal being brought fourth is to spend $20 billion to make medical records stored and sent electronically as opposed to the current paper filling system. Many advocates claim that these two parts of the plan would bring the cost of health care down considerably for everyone over the long term.
While the President claims that this issue can no longer be ignored. The fact of the matter is that affordable health care remains out of reach for many Americans. Only time will tell if there will truly be long lasting reforms that can make a big difference in the quality of life for 47 million uninsured Americans.
Lower costs brought to you by health insurers? Just How?
Health insurers have self-interest in keeping things as they are: unhappy patients, squeezed providers and little room for improvement in care thanks to their running of things under the mantra of “managed care”.
If ever there was a concept whose premise needs to be questioned, this is it.