Sunday, January 31, 2010

Katherine Kersten: Bipartisan health care? Yes, we can. | StarTribune.com

Katherine Kersten: Bipartisan health care? Yes, we can. | StarTribune.com
Kersten suggests there are ways to create a bipartisan solution. I agree but I do not agree with her suggestions as to how to do so. The suggestions miss the primary areas causing our health care payment system to fail. Sounds like a party line but the party isn't Republican. The party being followed hook, line and sinker is the big insurance company line. They have bought too many politicians and they have way too many lobbyists in D.C. Health care payment needs to be changed and it must be done first by terminating the failed experiment of for-profit health insurance as the way it is paid. The laws and rules they have gotten government to enact only protect them. We pretend the red tape is somehow done to them by bureaucrats. It is done by them to protect themselves. We need a hybrid of how we provide utilities and how we provide fire, police, roads and education. We need the docs to stay private and not become employed by government (except where it makes sense like Vets and County Hospitals). We need hospitals to all be non-profit and to be put on a budget instead of those expensive itemized bills. We do NOT need to continue the escalating ownership of provider clinics and hospitals by insurance companies. If we must have insurance in health care (which is the single biggest problem causing cost overruns), we MUST legally separate and outlaw ownership of a provider by an insurance company. They who pay for the care shall not be allowed to own the care provider. Our own United Health (with their 15 million per year CEO) runs huge insurance industries, providers and has their hands in administrative pieces of many providers and supposedly non-profit insurance companies in Minnesota. Kick out the Middle Man!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Kersten is a Tea-bagger type.

Craig, thank you as always for your insightful ideas.

Does anyone know if there is going to be any action in either the MN or WI state governments in 2010 on health care? I live in MN and their focus is the budget.

I'm heartened by CA -- even with their huge budget woes -- passing S-P thru their senate!

As for federal change, I personally am simply waiting for leadership to come up with something --ANYthing -- that I can lend support to, now that the filibuster-proof supermajority of Dems and Indendents is lost upon the Brown victory in MA. I feel ruderless and sort of lost, and feel a need for Obama and congress to let us know what we can do this year still to get SOME kind of reform passed.

Bipartisan solutions?? Ain't gonna happen. Why? Because the R's are focussed totally on the November election, and see it to their advantage to frustrate and oppose D (Obama) proposals at every turn. In this way of thinking (which I see as profoundly UNpatriotic) they have everything to lose by even inching toward a bipartisan solution.

Jim Gurley