Why Kentucky Needs Health Care Reform
Page One actually reads the federal report on the status of healch care in this country and finds that Kentucky can't survive without major health care reform.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released reports on the health care status quo today. What could be considered, uh, scary information on health care cost and quality in all fifty states is included.
SNIP
So let’s take a look at Kentucky’s report…
KENTUCKIANS CAN’T AFFORD THE STATUS QUO
Roughly 2.4 million people in Kentucky get health insurance on the job, where family premiums average $11,413, about the annual earning of a full-time minimum wage job.
Since 2000 alone, average family premiums have increased by 61 percent in Kentucky.
Household budgets are strained by high costs: 24 percent of middle-income Kentucky families spend more than 10 percent of their income on health care.
High costs block access to care: 17 percent of people in Kentucky report not visiting a doctor due to high costs.
Kentucky businesses and families shoulder a hidden health tax of roughly $1100 per year on premiums as a direct result of subsidizing the costs of the uninsured.
Read the whole thing.
And although the Obama administration's health care reform website does not say in so many words that only single-payer government insurance can save us from the approaching health care apocalypse, that is, in fact, the case.
In other words, if you oppose single-payer, why do you hate Medicare?
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The state of not only Kentucky's, but the entire nation's health care system is an absolutely unforgivable mess. I point out one possible solution in my current blog post.
I had a rather unpleasant encounter on this topic at my bank a week or so ago. I walked in, there was an older man (perhaps 70-75?)already in the bank, so I said "How are you, sir?" He must have decided he was going to tell me the answer to that question, and said, "I'm OK, but I just don't want that Obama running things. If you want socialized medicine, then Obama's your man."
I got pretty annoyed, and pointed out to him that Medicare, the program he was already undoubtedly on, was socialized medicine.
The argument petered out, the old man left, and I found myself entertaining thoughts of following him out into the parking lot, and kicking his ass for being so stupid that he didn't even know he was already on socialized medicine.
But I didn't. Not wishing to spend time in the local jail.
The point, though, was that so many people, mostly repugs but some Dems too, are so stupid and so easily frightened by something that is a) not even true, and b) even if it were true, is not worth being frightened over, that the rest of us are going to suffer.
Great Britain is doing well on socialized medicine; Canada is doing pretty well. There are other countries as well. In fact, USA is almost the only country in the First World that DOESN'T have some form of government-issued health insurance.
But we're just too good for all that. We'd rather continue to bankrupt people and our government, and jump off at socialized anything (socialized = communist in many people's minds), and fight so hard for their positions that we end up with the same too-expensive, inefficient system that we have now.
Mitch McMitch was on TV this morning. And he said, at least a half-dozen times in the space of a 5-minute or so interview, that America has the "best healthcare system in the world."
Here's what's really true: we have the best HEALTHCARE in the world, or perhaps one of the top three or four. But our healthcare SYSTEM - sux big-time.
Ask the next person you meet who had to take bankruptcy because of medical bills. There are a lot more of them than you think there are.
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