For the "Public Option"

So, here's my first go.

I wrote this today and sent it to The New York Times op-ed people as well as the local paper, The Village Herald. The latter might carry it, the former probably not. So I'm sharing it with you this way. (I hope my mild concessions to Kapital will be well understood as rhetorical.)...

Two questions are really bugging me these days: Where has our belief in the virtues of free-market competition gone? What are modest income people doing defending the rich more than they defend themselves?

A few years ago, I slipped on a wet curb in Paris, dislocated my foot and broke my ankle. I wasn’t a French citizen so, naturally, I had no insurance coverage there. Nevertheless, the nearest ER took me no questions asked. I received excellent treatment: x-rays, cast, crutches for when I started to hobble around again a week later. After a second set of x-rays when they took the cast off, I was billed for the full price: the equivalent of $350. Back home, my primary care physician told me that with no insurance here, someone would have paid $3,500 at least … provided that person got lucky and landed at a hospital that would treat him. And that was a few years ago!

Every single French citizen is covered by what we call a “public option.” Some of them supplement this with private insurance. Any U.S. citizen who is insured for medical treatment gets it from private insurance companies. Meanwhile, 15% of us have no medical insurance at all. And in times of precarious employment anyone who loses his job usually is bound to lose his medical coverage with it. The “public option” presently proposed is meant to cover that 15% who are out in the cold and at risk, literally, of dying there.

But there’s another, equally important purpose in the “public option.” We Americans hate monopolies just as we abhor greed. Right? One of the most rapacious sectors of our economy is the medical insurance industry. Just look at how much your copay has increased in the last couple of years! Just look at how many redundant tests you’re sent to have by various physicians! Just look at the families going broke or appealing to charity because they have a paraplegic daughter or an Alzheimer father! Just look at how much I would have paid in the U.S. to care for my broken ankle if that had happened here and I didn’t have insurance.

So, how do we diehard free-market fans achieve regulation? By creating competition! That’s precisely what the “public option” would introduce. A far lower priced alternative in the medical health arena (one that, by the same stroke, insures those who are perennially uninsured), the “public option” would create the kind of competition that would put the insatiable insurance vultures on a long overdue diet.

Now is that socialism? Certainly not! Quite the opposite. Breaking up monopolies by creating competitive markets in which affordable goods are sold is capitalism at its best. That’s what is being proposed. But the opponents of the “public option” in Congress know just how to distract and keep people uninformed: say the word “socialism” and everyone’s terrorized. But pay attention, people: those opponents the recipients of most obscene of the obscene amount of kickback money from the health industry!!

So, getting a grip, let’s review: Who would pay for the “public option”? Simple and clear: Taxpayers – don’t stop reading – whose net annual income is greater than a quarter of a million dollars a year. Period. It is their federal income tax that would be increased.

So what are all of these people attending town-hall meetings to shout and threaten shouting and threatening about? I bet not one single one of them makes over $250,000 a year. (That’s an understatement, in case my reader didn’t notice.) They won’t be charged a “red” cent! And if the worst should occur and any of them lose their job, guess what? They’ll continue to be insured for any health-related issues.

By shouting out the devil’s word, “socialism,” all these people are accomplishing is a wall of protection around the bags of gold that the bank executives, insurance CEOs, mortgage moguls, etc. have amassed at their expense. The truly threatened middle class is protecting the fat cats who have robbed them blind. They just sit back in their Wall Street offices and laugh. By ranting and railing against legislators who are trying to bring sanity back to capitalism, those who might tomorrow lose their health insurance and truly need the federal government are protecting legislators whose million dollar houses were bought with insurance lobby gifts.

Regulation of capitalism was flushed down the proverbial toilet during the Reagan presidency. Over the years since then, the rich got a lot richer, the poor remained poor, and the middle class was brought to the brink of total loss. Yes, the effects of “Reaganomics” accumulated until the dam finally burst last fall. And while we waited from November to January for a president who would begin to save capitalism from itself, Nero fiddled.