1/27/2010 5:01:00 AM Heart Land Patriots hear presentation on health care reform
BY KIRK DOUGAL
Times Bulletin Editor
kdougal@timesbulletin.com
VAN WERT - With health care reform legislation on the table in Washington D.C., the Heart Land Patriots met on Tuesday night to get some local feedback on what the proposed changes might mean to health care.
Nicholas Spoonmore, the Executive Director of Van Wert Medical Services, took the time to talk about what some of the effects might be from health care reform, beginning with how anything that someone in his position right now might say would purely be speculation since there has been no open dialog about changes while the Senate and House plans are being mashed into one piece of legislation. With that caveat in mind, Spoonmore did share his thoughts on parts of the two plans.
Spoonmore pointed out that health care reform has been bandied about in Congress in one form or another for a lot longer than many people realize, about 100 years since the presidential campaign of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter also ran on platforms that included some versions of health care reform.
But he pointed out that over the years there had been advances in health care legislation to improve medical care coverage. In the 1980s, legislation passed that said if a person showed up at an emergency room, no matter what their insurance, race, sex, or religion - they must be treated. A decade later, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA, passed in 1996 and greatly increased health insurance and availability for many Americans. Oddly enough, HIPAA was one of the few items that ever made it out of President Clinton's failed omnibus health care bill that managed to make it into law.
Spoonmore said right now about 46 million people do not have health care plans or roughly 15 percent of the population. But another important fact is that 83 million people are enrolled in public plans - either Medicare, veterans programs or CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Adding all these people to some sort of government run health care program asks the question of how hospitals and medical service providers can provide the same amount of coverage for everyone for the same amount of money. Spoonmore theorized that the system can not do that, meaning either the cost of health care itself would rise or, more likely, taxes to pay for it would need to increase dramatically.
Right now, Medicaid pays about 30 percent of a hospital or doctor's normal charges while Medicare pays about 45 percent. In other words, on a bill from a doctor's office for $100, the doctor must accept a payment of only $30 from a Medicaid patient and $45 from a Medicare patient.
The country is already seeing the effects of such a system. Six months ago, the Obama administration was holding up the Mayo Clinic facilities as a system that had discovered the proper way to run their health care. However, in the last two weeks, the Mayo Clinic in Arizona announced it would no longer accept Medicare patients because they were not making enough money from the payments to pay for the medical expenses. Spoonmore agreed that this posed a real possibility that there could become a two-tiered health care system in the U.S. where the best doctors and facilities would only serve private plans and patients who could pay out of pocket while everyone on the government plan received different health care. The other possibility was that doctors could decide that they could not make enough money under the American system and practice overseas or retire early, leaving a severe doctor shortage in the U.S. at a time when the largest portion of the population, the Baby Boomers, were growing older and demand would theoretically rise.
Spoonmore took questions from the audience during his presentation. Most of those revolved around inefficiencies in the health care and insurance systems and possible fixes.
Reader Comments
Posted: Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Article comment by:
Anderson
With an organizational name like "Heart Land Patriots" and the sort of commentary set forth in this article on healthcare reform I simply must say "B.S."!!
Thise same old worn out conjecture, fear mongering, and right wing ideology which is trying it's best to misinform, obstruct past due reform is simply nonesense. This nation cannot continue on the course set by the Republican party and their corporate / health insurance partners fleecing of the average working class. They will gladly support "corporate welfare", big oil, the pay for profit health insurance conglomerates (and unecessary bankrupting wars like Iraq) , but when it comes to helping Amercans with healthcare all they can do is cry foul and throw up every kind of unsubstantiated negative imaginable in order to obtruct reform. I see no "Patriotism" in that!
