Supporting John McCain? We should sit at a kitchen table together so I can set you straight.

Man, I am so irritated with the criticism that a national health care system will put “a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” Right now I have money-grubbing insurance companies between me and my doctor. Their job is to profit by limiting and denying care. Wouldn’t a “bureaucrat” be a little better?

In this election, though, it’s even more a total crap, straw-man argument.

Barack Obama is in no way, form, or fashion proposing the kind of single-payer health care (aka “socialized medicine”) that is enjoyed by most other citizens of developed countries. What is being proposed is good, affordable insurance coverage for everyone who needs it. Obama’s plan (and Clinton’s) is to offer the same Congressional health plan that he has to citizens of the United States who cannot get insurance elsewhere, or whose insurance is of such poor quality that they need something better.

They are asking small businesses and other employers who don’t offer insurance to either begin offering it, or pay into the government plan, though I think very small businesses are even exempt from that. If you’re unemployed or otherwise not getting insurance, you’ll still have to pay something for the national plan – but it will be affordable. If you are really sick and no insurance company will take you, but you make too much for Medicaid or aren’t old enough for Medicare, you would finally have somewhere to turn.

That’s it folks! Obama’s plan isn’t national health care at all, but national insurance coverage. So there really aren’t any bureaucrats to deal with, just more insurance companies.

I don’t see how Republicans can’t get behind this. Having more insured people will potentially lower health care costs for everyone. But no, John McCain instead wants to make things WORSE than they are already! He is offering a meager tax credit to help people individually purchase insurance, but he also proposes making Americans pay taxes on their employer-provided health insurance. Seems to me it’s a tax increase on working Americans (something he says only the evil Democrats do!) AND it doesn’t actually change the system. It just forces Americans to pay more for what they are already getting, and continues to put them at the mercy of the insurance companies.

I don’t know how anyone who cares about health care can vote for John McCain.

And while I will certainly be voting for Obama in the fall, I think his plan is a FAR cry from fixing health care in this country. If you watched Sicko, Michael Moore’s excellent documentary about health care, you’d know that even insured people are so routinely getting screwed over when they get sick, that even once everyone has health insurance, we will still need major health care reform in this country.

Fundamentally, it’s my view that insurance companies as they exist now are deeply flawed institutions because they take money from people when they’re well and don’t give it back the way they should when they’re sick. They underpay health care providers like doctors and nurses, create mounds of paperwork for health care professionals and patients, which raises administrative costs all around. Many people I know who work in health care say they often have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to get paid, and that time they spend hoop-jumping is time they aren’t seeing patients and also often aren’t even getting paid.

So can someone please tell me how much worse things would be if “a bureaucrat” was between me and my doctor? Can someone then explain how our insurance system is so much better since we spend more per person on health care in the U.S. than any other country, and yet rank lower than most developed countries in terms of actual care received? Is our health care system really that great if we are spending more but getting less? Is our health care system better if so many doctors and nurses are so grossly overworked to the point where they give crappy care? (Everyone says that doctors get paid more in the US, but I wonder if they really do relative to how many hours they have to put in on the job and the actual care that they are able to give.)

Why doesn’t all of this mess scream that there’s something wrong with the way we are doing things?

See more: http://healthcarevoices.org