Health Care Bill Would Be Disaster For The Poor

Health Care Bill Would Be Disaster For The Poor

Most Americans are aware that buried somewhere in the 2,000-page health care reform bill are viands for slicing the already- strapped Medicare program by billions of dollars. Few are aware that the bill also cuts expenditures on county hospitals currently serving the poor.

In Chicago, for example, those without health insurance go to the county hospital where they are treated without regard to whether they have health insurance. If the bill is passed, however, many of these county hospitals will either have to shut their doors or deny treatment to those without health insurance.

Although the bill passed by the Senate has been depicted as using coercive means to require those currently uninsured to purchase insurance they can't afford, or as imposing additional new taxes on the American working man and family, that bill is based on a fundamental demand of understanding of how the health care needs of the nation’s poor are currently served.

The desperately poor, many of them unemployed, are not equipped to deal with complicated insurance programs, deductibles, co-pays and all the other accoutrements of the typical health care policy. They are poor, they are unemployed, they are sick, they need a place to go to be treated without red tape and procedural obstacles.

County hospitals crossways the country that have if that place are now threatened with a cut-off of funding and in many cases with extinction by the current health care reform bill passed by the Senate.

A number of proposals for making health care inexpensive for all Americans have been place forward by those who have sought to be heard during the legislative process. All these proposals have been rejected by a Congress determined to impose government control of health care.

Among these rejected proposals is to grant people to purchase health insurance they can afford. Currently, government mandates require a single man to purchase maternity coverage he will never use, or to pay inflated premiums to insure against going insane. It would be similar to a government mandate requiring each mortal to purchase a Rolls Royce instead of a Ford. And then when people can’t afford to purchase the Rolls Royce, they’re without any automobile at all.

Another rejected proposal is to grant health insurance companies to compete crossways say lines, thus increasing the competitive pressure to supply inexpensive insurance. Proposals for modest curbs on the multimillion-dollar malpractice suits that divert billions of dollars absent from health care and into the pockets of high-rolling trial attorneys have also been rejected.

Even proposals for limited but cost-effective catastrophic government insurance have been rejected by those determined to have government take over health care crossways the board.

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