As the battle to overhaul the current health care system in America heats up, President Obama and Congress try to reach an agreement about the future of health care in America. Overhauling the health care system is Obama's top domestic priority, but initial proposals to reached Congress last week and received a rocky reception. House and Senate Democrats are responding by intensifying their efforts. President Obama is aiming to succeed where every Democratic president since Harry Truman has failed by passing universal coverage. He has also further raised the stakes by reiterating a promise in recent days to get a bill on his desk by fall. Obama has spent this entire afternoon pushing the case for reform with a bipartisan group of governors before holding a nationally televised, White House town hall-style meeting on the issue Wednesday night.
The price tag for the health care system overhaul may hit the $1 trillion mark, but I believe that in the long run it will more than pay for itself. 2/3 of the cost will come from re-allocating money already in the health care system and 1/3 will come from new revenue. The new plan will also offer incentives to to try draw more doctors and nurse practioners back into the area of primary care. Another main objective of the new health care system is to give doctors more power to make decisions about a patients care, not insurance companies and "one-size fits all" policies.
I am excited by President Obama and the House Democrats' efforts because everyone deserves quality health care. It's not only the rich that deserve a high quality of life. You can, however, always count on Republicans to try to put up a roadblock towards a progressive society. After all, they're not called the Grand Ol' Party for nothing. Republicans are confident they can deal a major blow to Obama's young administration by derailing any major health care initiative. They point back to the defeat of President Clinton's health care reform plan in 1994, which helped pave the way for a GOP takeover of Congress that same year.
Another possible good outcome from universal health care, is that hopefully it will give private insurers an initiative to bring their cost down in order to compete with the public plan. Many times private plans are way too overpriced and they pretty much rob patients. It shouldn't cause private insurers to go out of business as long as they make the appropriate cost efficient cuts to compete, because inevitably you will have some people who will want to go with a private insurer. I have my fingers crossed and I pray that Obama can do this for America. :)
1 comment:
The only concern I have with universal health care is that some of the greedy, but good specialists may leave America because they aren't getting paid as much now. I have a best friend who had an amputation who needs her doctors and a cousin who just had a liver transplant because of cancer. I want both of them to be able to continue with their current doctors and not someone else because their doctors are greedy and leave.
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