A couple of bones to pick

Most folks have heard, at least in passing, about the the Employee Free Choice Act, or “card check,” working its way through Congress this week. And most of what we seem to hear is basically negative. Lies, even.

If you tell the truth you may not get what you want, I guess.

So here we have this great hullabaloo of worry about secret ballots, something the worriers know the American public cherishes above practically everything else. But it’s all a fraud.

What are the worriers worried about? They say they are worried about the process by which employees of a business decide whether they want to bargain as a group for things like hours, wages and benefits.

Who’s doing the worrying? The employers. That should tell you something.

But the employers aren’t worried about the outcome, not at all. They say they are just trying to be sure that their poor dumb employees aren’t denied the right to a secret ballot.

That argument is what’s dumb. The legislation in Congress right now, the Employee Free Choice Act, or “card-check,” provides for each and every employee to receive a card with the following choices:

The employee can sign up in favor of joining a union, or not. Or he can choose to have a secret ballot on the matter. The employees get to choose.

Secret ballot. There it is, right there. If the majority of the cards come back with the secret ballot choice checked, there you are, it’ll be a secret ballot.

But if 50%-plus-one come back checked in favor of having a union, the employees get to have a union. That’s a majority, but it would appear the employers who are fighting this are afraid a majority of their workers might actually want to have a union. The dirty little secret is that employers don’t want it to be simple.

Gotta wonder why.

* * *

Good ol’ Newt Gingrich is back, maybe getting a good start on 2012, and has been on various TV shows holding forth on just about everything under the sun, or at least everything Barack Obama is doing. Which he opposes.

In the context of the leadership struggles within the Republican party, Newt comes across as the sane elder statesman, according to some.

So, last week he suggested that Obama should have taken out the North Korean rocket test with some kind of laser weapon, an idea perhaps intended to show how high-tech he thinks; “high” might be the operative word here because we don’t seem to have such in our arsenal.

On at least one Sunday show he shared his opinion on health care reform, or at least what he perceives as Obama’s plan taking us down the road to “putting everyone on Medicaid.”

Now, I can’t be sure he meant to say “Medicaid,” though he said it several times, because I know the comparison that’s been drawn to one of the options being proposed for a national health care solution is “Medicare,” a very different breed of cat.

Medicaid, a form of health care coverage for the working poor, might as well be unavailable so far as Ellis County residents are concerned. Most doctors can’t afford to offer it because it pays so poorly.

Medicare, on the other hand, which most senior citizens have, is agreed by all but the unfeeling to be good coverage, cost-effective and efficient. A government plan that lets you choose your own doctor and make your own decisions, by the way.

And no, Obama’s plan is not “socialized” medicine, nor is Medicare for that matter; however, that’s the favorite term of argument for those who prefer that private insurance companies continue to make your decisions, choose your doctor, deny coverage when you most need it, and make lots of money in the process.


Originally published in the Waxahachie Daily Light April 13, 2009.

Short and sweet: Health care

What amazes me most about the ongoing health care debate is the finality with which some politicians and their pundit supporters dismiss the idea of universal health care, and especially single payer plans, with the nail-in-the-coffin reminder that “You don’t want the government running your health care, do you?”

And folks who don’t stop to think about it may agree, because they certainly don’t want the government running their health care, nosiree.

So I guess they’ll be turning down Medicare when they retire.

Unless they, like Joe Barton, are members of Congress, in which case they already have government-run health care. Doesn’t seem to bother him at all.

It’s been understood for years that the abysmal state of our health care system is a drain on our national economy, not to mention a drain on the health and pocketbooks of the millions of American citizens who have no health care coverage.

Who do you think pays for those emergency room visits by the uninsured?

America is the only major industrialized nation that does not provide some form of universal health care for its citizens. But this year, happily, we are offered some real ideas for fixing the health care system. And the reader is well advised to listen, learn and then choose.

The New England Journal of Medicine, a respected and non-partisan publication, has published its evaluation of the proposals by Barack Obama and John McCain, and I want to describe the main points here, in the order they are listed by the Journal.

John McCain’s plan:

Proposes to make employer-paid health insurance premiums taxable to the employee;

Provides for $2500 per worker or $5,000 per family refundable tax credit for those purchasing private insurance;

Creates a high-risk pool for persons who are unable to purchase that insurance; promotes less comprehensive insurance policies;

Proposes to deregulate insurance markets;

Proposes to reform Medicare to make bundled payments for episodes of care and pay on the basis of outcomes.

Barack Obama’s plan:

Proposes requiring employers (except very small businesses) to either offer insurance to employees or pay a tax;

For the uninsured and small businesses, would create a new national health plan similar to Medicare, and establishes a new national health insurance exchange that would offer choice of private insurance options;

Mandates that all children must have coverage (expanding the SCHIP program);

Would provide subsidies to lower-income Americans to help them afford coverage;

Would expand coverage, financed through the payroll tax, letting tax cuts for families making over $250,000 expire, and savings from electronic medical records, disease management, and other system reforms;

Would regulate private insurance plans to end risk rating based on health status;

Proposes to insure business against the costs of workers’ expensive medical episodes.

These, again, are the highlights. For each of the candidates there are other proposed measures to control costs and improve quality, but the ones I’ve reported are selected by the Journal as “key elements” of the respective plans.

However you get there, universal health care is not just a do-good, feel-good, help- the-afflicted issue. It’s a bread and butter issue for the country.