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August 16, 2009
The context of the current debates in the US over public health insurance and health care is the Clinton administration's health reform debacle; the profound divisions among current Democrats in Congress (conservative, "Blue Dog" Democrats) over how to pay for health reform and how control costs to the inclusion of a public insurance option; and the refusal of the insurance industry to end the controversial practice of "rescission."
Under rescission, insurers retroactively cancel—often on the basis of dubious claims that policyholders haven't disclosed their complete health histories—the coverage of those who develop expensive medical conditions. That has left many people with costly medical bills for treatments that had been previously authorized by their insurance.
Martin Rowson
Scare talk about big government and threats to free enterprise is always present in debates about providing, financing, and regulating American health insurance. Paul Waldman at American Prospect argues in All the Rage Over Health-Care Reform that though the present anger of the American Right is being thrown at the administration's attempt to reform health care, that rage goes much deeper than any one policy; and that should the health-care plan fail, it will continue to simmer unabated. since they have a deeper undercurrent in the polity.
He says:
What gives the conservative pundits' their message all the more power is that this shocking transition happened at a time of economic misery, when more and more people are suffering. Even those who haven't lost their jobs are worrying more about their economic future than they ever have before. People are afraid and uneasy, and some of them have the growing feeling that something just isn't right. It isn't just the economy. It's everything they see around them, in a society that becomes more complex and inscrutable all the time, where the traditional arrangements that gave order and hierarchy and predictability to the world and their place in it are breaking down. It's more than the knowledge that some pencil-pusher could lay them off at any moment. It's kids who don't respect their elders. It's walking down the street and hearing people speaking foreign languages. It's everything that makes them feel threatened and uncertain and out of place.
And when they turn on their radios and televisions, they find a kind of order. I know what you're feeling, they are told, and I can tell you at whom you ought to be mad, so let's yell and scream and fear and rage together. It isn't your boss; it isn't Wall Street,. No, it's a new administration and the people it represents, the people who made you into a minority of all things, the people whom we can turn into an amalgam of every enemy you've ever hated. It's them.
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reducing the number of uninsured Americans would be a major achievement in US health reform.