Let ’em eat premiums

It was good to see the Los Angeles Times, in its recent American Values editorial on “General Welfare,” taking healthcare reform seriously enough to expect some kind of position from presidential candidates. Sadly though, just as the candidates don’t seem to have had actual thoughts, opinions and plans for healthcare until they were well along in running for the Oval Office, The Times did not mention the one factor that absolutely must be dealt with fairly for any meaningful progress in insuring all the people in the United States.

Affordable health insurance must be available for purchase to all people. Currently, it isn’t. Leaving health insurance to private industry or the “free-market economy” excludes a very large number of people from purchasing insurance at all because of “preexisting conditions.”

The insurance industry keeps a shared database of people who have been turned down for individual policies, and as medical data get more and more computerized, supposedly to protect the consumer, medical histories will become more and more accessible. As it is, all applicants are required to disclose previously known medical histories, which of course is fair — more fair for the potential insurers than the consumers, but still fair. The results range from outright rejection to a prohibitively expensive price quote.

What is wrong with that? A good (insured) free marketeer might say that’s the price people pay for choices they make, that insurance companies need to make hard choices for the good of the majority, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that the same people the insurance companies want no part of with individual policies are easily covered to great corporate profit when included in employer-provided policy pools right now. Which means something can be set up to cover all Americans but that politicians and corporations are either too stupid or too lazy or too greedy (or perhaps all three) to make the effort.

As 2007 draws to a close, many Americans can’t buy health insurance, and not just for economic reasons. Every politician with an IQ larger than his or her waist size knows this. Legal mandates that require every American to buy health insurance will only make insurance corporations richer and debtors prisons an attractive investment option. Perhaps that’s the point. It would be good for the economy to put construction workers back on payrolls building medium-security prisons, and to create other jobs administering and guarding the facilities. Given the moral climate we are enduring, there should be no end to the growth of “clients” for such operations. We could pack the medically uninsured in with the homeless, foreclosed-upon, evicted families. A new year is upon us, and the U.S. could use a good sprucing-up.

Nels Norene is a writer living in Camarillo.