I'm very antsy today. We should have had class outside.
Anyway, there's this bizarre coalition that a couple of our partners pulled out of earlier this month. It's called the Health Reform Dialogue, and today, it announced it has come to a consensus on reform.
Yeah, not so much. As Richard points out in our official statement:
“After months of discussions the groups that remained in the Health Reform Dialogue could not agree on the tough decisions that Congress and the President must make,” said Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager for Health Care for America Now. “They didn’t answer whether employers will be required to provide or help pay for coverage. They didn’t answer whether insurance companies will be allowed to hike rates on businesses when an employee gets sick or charge more for people who are older or women. Will Americans be guaranteed good, affordable health coverage or be stuck with high-deductible, bare-bones plans? Will we have a choice of private or public health insurance plans? By failing to address these crucial questions, they’ve moved the health care debate forward a few inches. In the next few months, Congress and the President will need to go the full mile.”My favorite quote from the Health Reform Dialogue release comes from the health insurance lobby (emphases mine):
“The contributions from each stakeholder in the Health Reform Dialogue over the past six months have forged a consensus that the time for health care reform is now.”Wow. That's quite an accomplishment. Good thing we took a gamble and used it in our name.
--Karen Ignagni, president & CEO, America’s Health Insurance Plans
Speaking of HCAN, I've got one last conference call and then I am going to try and sneak out before anyone notices I've made the great escape. Have an excellent weekend.
1 comment:
An opinion by one CNNfan → No, we are not there yet, and we may never get there. Health insurance is too big to fail. So if it can't ever fail, why would it ever need fixing?
Fixing Healthcare Personally
My Doctor prescribed me anti-biotic pills, that were approved in error at another pharmacy. So the health insurance wouldn't cover it. This revealed the true prescription charge to be over $127.00 for seven anti-biotic pills. That is over $18.00 for each pill.
This made me realize that this situation required fixing healthcare personally. I took a stand and demanded that the pharmacy reverse the error, and put it back through a second time so that it was reduced to only $5.00 or 71 cents for each pill.
A stark reminder of what it means not to have health insurance in this country. In this case an uninsured person would have to pay over 25 times more for the same anti-biotic pill when they got sick. So it was a learning experience on how health insurance hides the extremely unaffordable price of healthcare.
I am glad that Jacki Schechner is at least trying to fix healthcare. It is very important work for America.
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