Majority Chose Obama to Reform Health Care
April 18, 2010
Jackson Sun Op-Ed by T. Robert Hill
Republican Dr. Jack Cassell, a urologist in the Orlando area, single-handedly pushed the health care reform debate to an all-time low when he posted his office door with the following sign: IF YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA ... SEEK UROLOGIC CARE ELSEWHERE. CHANGES TO YOUR HEALTH CARE BEGIN RIGHT NOW, NOT IN FOUR YEARS.
Dr. Cassell's patients have felt the sting of his self-important whip, but what will be the impact on the average American of the recently passed, historic Health Insurance Reform Act? Will it be the change we wanted or the Armageddon predicted by Republicans and their political allies, the Teabaggers?
President-elect Barack Obama, in his election night address to hundreds of thousands of cheering supporters in a Chicago park and millions more Americans on network and cable television, cautioned: "This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the right to make that change."
Seventy percent of the American public said before the 2008 election that health insurance reform was one of the most pressing problems facing our nation. An estimated 40 million Americans were without any health insurance. Millions more had
only minimal coverage. Hundreds of thousands of families found themselves facing financial bankruptcy due to overwhelming medical expenses. Homes and lives
were lost as an unregulated and non-competitive medical insurance industry held the citizens of this nation in financial bondage, ever fearful of a catastrophic illness that would leave the family destitute and possibly on the street.
It was against this backdrop that a new, young president with a new staff and a new Congress, embarked on the most significant legislative effort since the Civil Rights Act and the Voter Rights Act of the 1960s to make health care accessible to all Americans and to change how health care would be paid for.
Did he succeed? I believe he did and that history will place his leadership on health care reform in the same category as Social Security, Medicare and civil rights.
So, what does the Health Insurance Reform Act mean to you? In a nutshell, HIRA provides the following significant changes:
1. Reform prohibits health insurance companies from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions or medical history, a practice that plagues millions of working Americans who can afford insurance but cannot find a company that will cover them for any price.
2. Reform limits or caps what health insurance companies can force you to pay in co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. You should no longer see health policies with a $5,000 family deductible or individual deductibles of $2,000 or more.
3. Reform prevents insurance companies from capping annual or lifetime medical benefits. You will no longer have to fear having a catastrophic illness only to be told in the midst of treatment that you have reached your maximum benefit level and your
insurance company will no longer pay your medical bills.
4. Reform will allow you to keep your child on your family policy until age 26, a needed change as more children stay in school longer or cannot get or afford coverage on their own. This provision alone is expected to affect 2 million uninsured young people immediately.
5. Reform means an end to the "donut hole" in Medicare Part D, which will dramatically reduce costs and anxiety associated with the purchase of prescription medications by our elderly population.
6. Reform will assist individuals and small businesses to provide health care by providing tax credits as an incentive. As a small businessman, I will be able to continue to provide health care for my employees.
7. Reform provides that you can keep the coverage you currently have if you want to, protecting the extremely small minority of Americans who have broad, affordable coverage at reasonable rates.
8. Reform establishes a nationwide insurance exchange so that consumers of health insurance products can compare coverage and prices, insuring competition on a national plane.
9. Reform addresses health care for children in a broad way, requiring that policies cover basic pediatric services, including dental, vision and hearing, while aggressively promoting a significantly higher quality of pediatric medical care.
If one researches the pre-2008-election wish list of the 70 percent of Americans who wanted change in the health insurance system, I suggest you will find that HIRA addresses at least 90 percent of the major issues that have created a crisis in our health care delivery system, annually placing us near the bottom of major industrialized nations in many categories.
So, I would answer the question posed earlier with a resounding "yes." We now have the change we seek because we have a president who cares more about the nation he leads than the polls he reads.
