07.20.09
Welcome home, Olympia
It’s Health Care Week! We bloggers are supposed to blog about health care every day to get everybody informed and with the program. Here goes…
Last week I heard that my Senator, Olympia Snowe, was unwilling to support any public option for health care unless there was a trigger. To say the least, I was disappointed.
- Public option
- Surely you’ve heard about this. It’s kind of like public health insurance. It would be a choice for those who can’t afford private insurance, or who are uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions. People who decided that the public option was a better choice could choose it over their private insurance.
- Health care
- Health care is when you get medical services to get you healthy. It should not be confused with health insurance, which is no guarantee that any health care will be received.
- Trigger
- This would be give the insurance companies another chance to make health insurance and health care available and affordable to all.
They would have a decade or so to decide how they were going to accomplish that goal delay until they managed to get it removed from consideration by a subsequent administration or Congress they had bought out.
Okay, I was really displeased about the situation. For me, the public option is not even really adequate, but it’s the only thing on the table that seems to be a step in the right direction.
Other suggestions have been exceedingly reactionary, such as taxing health insurance benefits and forcing the uninsured to buy junk insurance.
There are those who say that any reform is better than no reform, but I am not one of them. I think that a “reform” whose net result is making health care scarcer and more expensive for those who need it most is no reform at all.
But today I heard that Sen. Snowe is going to strongly support the public option. I don’t have to go to her office now to talk with the good-looking young men who work there, but maybe I will stop in anyway to say “Thank you!”
Maybe Susan Collins will come over from the dark side now. But probably not.
