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Consumers: "Give Us More Options!"
We desperately need another public insurance alternative. This will give a much needed health care option to a large portion of our society that has currently been getting by on a patchwork of local and federal public health benefits. A public insurance option will also be additional competition to the commercial health insurances. By increasing people's options and increasing competition, all should benefit from the additional public health insurance.
I work as the medical director of a community health center in Washington that treats a large number of patients who are HIV positive. A great deal of the Clinic's efforts for new patients are finding them health insurance coverage or other ways of paying for their medications. Health care should not be this difficult especially given the urgent health needs of so many of my patients. Our public benefits staff struggles to put together an often-times partial health and pharmaceutical coverage for our patients, which is administratively burdensome and often inadequate.
The current large public insurances including Medicare and Medicaid have gotten a bad rap. We can learn from these systems to produce a health care option that does not seem to take over health care, like Medicare, but is enough of an option to drive competition. For any new public health insurance, everything should be driven by improving health care outcomes through clinical guidelines-driven preventative medicine.
I look forward to the new and improved version of public health care where it can push competition in our existing public and commercial health networks. But most importantly I am eager for improved medical coverage for my patients and improved clinical outcomes based on this enhanced public health coverage and additional access to health care.
By
Raymond Martins
|
August 7, 2009; 6:08 PM ET
| Category:
Public option
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Posted by: lensch | August 11, 2009 12:50 PM
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Here is a question from one of Ezra Klien's chat regarding comptition in health insurance:
"Grand Junction, Colo.: Ezra - What's a succint counter to people who continuously assert "the market will solve all" and the like, in reference to health care reform or any other ail of the day? It's mind numbing and I want friends with this "view" to think about what they're saying.
Ezra Klein: Look around.
The thing about the market is that it doesn't solve problems. It works towards efficiencies. The market's solution to the problem of "a lot of people can't afford health-care coverage" is that "a lot of people can't afford health-care coverage." That's what the market does: Given scarce resources, it apportions them according to the capacity to pay. A lot of people can't afford a Lexus. Thus, a lot of people don't have a Lexus. That's not a market failure. It's the market's solution.
The market isn't failing to solve the problem here. It's just that we don't want the market's solution. We want people to have health care. So we need to go beyond the market. It's the same as fire departments or national defense or roads. There are things we want people to have even if they can't pay for it."