December 2013 – Page 6 – The Health Care Blog

I Would Rather Die at Home

Dec 1, 2013• 31

By THCBist

A THCB reader in Tennessee writes:

Thanks for listening. I am a single 55 year old male in Tennessee. I’m not offered insurance from my employer. June of 2012 I was diagnosed with Essential Thrombocytosis. A blood disease that messes up your platelets. Took every test they could think of to figure it out. In and out of hospital, adding up debt by the second, I stopped going to doctors, stopped buying meds. I drag myself to work, every day, just to survive. Under Obamacare it will be, for the worst plan, $571.00 a month, with a $ 5100.00 deductible. I can’t afford that. I would rather die in my home as it would be better than being homeless. Is this a joke?

The Presidential Healthcare Curse – Why Do They Even Try?

Dec 1, 2013• 30

By DAVID BLUMENTHAL, MD

Until now, virtually every president who has dabbled with comprehensive health reform has failed spectacularly, often at huge political cost. Think of Harry Truman’s lonely campaign for national health insurance, Jimmy Carter’s devastating conflict with the late Senator Edward Kennedy over universal health care coverage, the first George Bush’s ineffectual (and little-remembered) health insurance proposal, or Bill Clinton’s damaging first-term effort to pass health reform.

Health reform is a presidential nightmare. No sane presidential consigliere would ever recommend his or her boss try it. Our health care system is so complicated and convoluted that any conceivable proposal is bound to make someone worse off. And in health care, worse off can mean real pain and suffering that creates powerful, emotional stories that echo through the news cycle. There is simply no way for presidential health care reformers to avoid grievous political harm, as the experience of President Barack Obama is now demonstrating in spades.

Which raises the question: why bother? It would have been so easy for President Obama, in the midst of the Great Recession of 2008, to kick the health care can down the road, saying that his all-consuming priority was economic revival, and that health reform could wait.

The answer provides critical context for the relentless stream of troubling news—and the cacophony of charges and counter-charges—about the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that fill the media each day. The reason to proceed with this painful technical and political process is that there is no alternative. Before the ACA, the current health care system—and especially its private insurance market—was collapsing before our eyes, like a house tipping into a sinkhole.