The latest tax cut for the ultra-rich has failed. It failed because it was masquerading as a health care bill. You know the one — repeal and replace Obamacare. It died after four Republican senators said they would not support it, two — including Kentucky’s Rand Paul — because it was too generous to poor people. Ohio’s Rob Portman was an assumed yes vote, though he never said for sure.
The Senate bill was not quite as bad as the one passed by the House, for which our local congresspersons gladly voted. (Except Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, who, like Paul, wanted even more poor people uninsured.)
So how would Ohio and Kentucky have fared under the Senate version? By 2020, the non-elderly uninsured would increase in Ohio from 6.5 percent to 18 percent. In real people, that’s an increase of 1,086,000, or 178 percent. In Kentucky, the numbers are an additional 532,000 without insurance, a whopping 227 percent increase.
So one Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, spent most his efforts so far this year trying to take health care away from a half-million of his constituents. And Rob Portman was maybe, or maybe not, willing to put more than one million Ohioans in the same non-life boat.
Our congresspeople, and Senator Paul, wanted more people to lose health care.
The problem here is quite simple. Republican office holders mostly just don’t believe that health care is a right. But they do believe you have “freedom” not to have healthcare.
This theory goes against that of every other civilized nation. Only in the USA would someone declare that there is a “freedom” not to have health care. But those who choose not to have health insurance when the rest of have it, are making us pay for theirs. No one will die in the streets — though that seems to be some Senators’ desired outcome. People will be treated whether they are insured or not, and the costs passed to those who are insured, or to the government. It’s just shuffling dollars.
The only workable solution, of course, is a single-payer system — one place to bill for medical services, not dozens of insurance companies plus Medicare and Medicaid.
We already spend about twice what other countries spend on health care, much of it on paperwork, and we get worse outcomes. Let’s put all the health-care dollars we already spend in one big pot. I bet we can cover everyone for about what we spend now. Or less.
MARK PAINTER is a Cincinnati native who served as a judge for 30 years. Contact him: letters@citybeat.com.
This article appears in Jul 19-26, 2017.