The Great Northern States Health Care Initiative is a group of people from Minnesota and Wisconsin who have come together for the purpose of advocacy for a better health care system in our respective states and the nation. Our main objective is education of ourselves and others in our communities on the imperatives of a single payer health care system.
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Krugman’s assessment leaves out one extremely important reality and understates a second.
He left out the reality that his approach is a surrender to the power of the health insurance industry that, as he says, “played a major part in killing health reform in the early 1990s.” As he also says, Obamacare was specifically designed to rely on private insurance to keep those insurers from killing it. Now Krugman recommends walking away from a national healthcare system that even he acknowledges is both better and less expensive than Obamacare, again in deference to the insurance industry’s desires. Allowing the insurance industry to control our lives and our health is not practicality, it is an abandonment of our rights in a democracy and it is a very big mistake.
Krugman also understates the problems that Obamacare is causing out here in “reality.” Expanding Medicaid has helped the poorest of us get some care, but that program’s low reimbursement rates mean that many doctors decline to treat Medicaid patients. The doctors who do take Medicaid are swamped by the newly Medicaid eligible, and may lose money treating them.
For many people who buy insurance policies through the exchange, massive deductibles must be paid before the insurer pays anything. Doctors across the country have noted the increase in the number of “insured” patients who are having serious problems figuring out how to both eat and pay their deductibles. Krugman wrongly says that “access to health insurance for all Americans” has been the goal. It’s access to health care—not to insurance—that matters. Obamacare too often fails to achieve it.
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Krugman’s assessment leaves out one extremely important reality and understates a second.
He left out the reality that his approach is a surrender to the power of the health insurance industry that, as he says, “played a major part in killing health reform in the early 1990s.” As he also says, Obamacare was specifically designed to rely on private insurance to keep those insurers from killing it. Now Krugman recommends walking away from a national healthcare system that even he acknowledges is both better and less expensive than Obamacare, again in deference to the insurance industry’s desires. Allowing the insurance industry to control our lives and our health is not practicality, it is an abandonment of our rights in a democracy and it is a very big mistake.
Krugman also understates the problems that Obamacare is causing out here in “reality.” Expanding Medicaid has helped the poorest of us get some care, but that program’s low reimbursement rates mean that many doctors decline to treat Medicaid patients. The doctors who do take Medicaid are swamped by the newly Medicaid eligible, and may lose money treating them.
For many people who buy insurance policies through the exchange, massive deductibles must be paid before the insurer pays anything. Doctors across the country have noted the increase in the number of “insured” patients who are having serious problems figuring out how to both eat and pay their deductibles. Krugman wrongly says that “access to health insurance for all Americans” has been the goal. It’s access to health care—not to insurance—that matters. Obamacare too often fails to achieve it.
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