Lobbyists united to sabotage health care reform

The voice of opposition to health care reform is getting louder, noisier, and more deceptive in the Capitol Hill. Politicians are more concerned about preserving the profit margins of the health insurance companies than reducing the cost and improving the quality and outcome of health care.

At the center of the issue is whether a public insurance plan (public option) should be offered to compete with private insurance plans. Politicians supported by big health care businesses are fighting tooth to nail to thwart a public option, which is absolutely essential for implementing needed reform to reduce health care cost and improve quality over long run. Instead of offering a coherent opposition to public option, which is supported by 70% of Americans according to some surveys, these politicians are actually focusing their opposition to the estimated high cost of providing universal health insurance to cover the uninsured. This is a very smart tactics, because the public at large is very concerned about the ballooning federal budget deficit.

But focusing on the cost is really misleading. Regardless we have HC reform or not, this cost remains the same as long as we have to cover the roughly 45 million uninsured. In fact the cost will continue to rise if we do NOT reform the current system. The cost is NOT due to reform. The cost is precisely the reason we need reform.

Public option is absolutely critical to health care reform. Without it, how can we implement the badly needed changes to the entire reimbursement system, which is at the core of the problems of our health care system. Private insurance companies have never implemented any reform. What they are mostly concerned about is not the fairness and effectiveness of the HC system, but the profitability of their business. That is understandable. That is why we need a public plan to promote reform, provide standards, and guide the benefit design and reimbursement to better align payment/profit with clinical outcome.

I have been reading google news Health section. Google rank news based on how many people read the news. I have not seen any news items appeared in Google's Health section in the past two weeks when HC Reform was the hottest topic in DC. People simply are not paying attention! That gives the lobbyists a huge chance to thwart HC reform.

I am very pessimistic about HC reform. American public is just too stupid and ill-informed to understand how critical the reform is to their quality of life and that of their children's. They are not paying attention. They give such an important issue to the hands of the lobbyists.

This is how democracy works.