Final Speech

On March 12^th, 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama with the strong support of the Democratic Party despite ardent opposition from the health care industry. Before this landmark legislation was passed, health insurance companies believed that they had the right to treat their customers as if they were not people by denying them coverage for pre-existing conditions and hiring medical professionals to help the company avoid paying its customers’ bills. However, under the new Obama administration, these repugnant practices were going to finally come to an end because Obama Care was supposed to solve these problems, yet the primary problem remains in the form of high costs for the average consumer. Even with this new legislation, our costs are still the highest in the western world.  There are a variety of health care models that can satisfy our needs and can address the low quality & high cost of care we receive in emergency rooms and in the doctors’ office, so has our problem really been solved?

            While the issue of cost was not fully addressed in the crafting of the new health care law, great progress was made in regulating the insurance industry which had abused its power as private corporations by denying coverage to their customers using a variety of tactics. Under the new law, individuals cannot be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, insurance companies are required to provide the same rates to everyone regardless of health or gender, and finally preventative care must be fully covered by the insurance company. With these great strides, Americans have a much healthier society to look forward to because preventative care will now serve as a mechanism to reduce illness earlier and to prevent bad habits like smoking or alcohol abuse. However, as Obama Care has sternly regulated the insurance companies, it has not insured all Americans like it promised. Despite the mandate requiring health insurance, 48.6 million people are still uninsured according to Bloomberg News. This is an appalling figure. It is morally unjust for Americans to ignore the needs of our fellow citizens who need help just so we can satisfy our own needs as private individuals.

Although Obama Care has made important gains in regulating the health care industry’s unscrupulous practices, the amount of money it has added to the federal deficit has been enormous and may actually decreased the availability for employees to receive health insurance from their employers. Initially, President Obama claimed that he would not sign a health care plan that “adds one dime” to the deficit, but the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office states that the new plan will add $210 billion to the federal deficit that is currently in the trillion dollar range. While some argue that the deficit may be reduced over time, the long-term costs of the current system remain. In addition to a rising federal deficit, employers are now forcing employees to become part-time employees to avoid providing health insurance for them. If we continue on this totally free-market approach to health care, it remains clear that the situation will only drive up costs instead of reducing them.

Socialized medicine is a term that evokes controversy from attacks by those who really do not understand it because it holds a connotation of the government making medical decisions for the individual, yet Americans have embraced the concept in the VA system and Medicare. While European nations usually are vilified for using this type of medicine, nations like France and Germany use a very different system actually quite similar to what we use in the United States.  Across the world, there are a variety of health care models that countries use to provide care to their citizens. For example, the British use the national health system model providing free care to every citizen and the Canadians use the national health insurance model providing health insurance to every citizen. As the filmmaker Michael Moore notes in his documentary, Sicko, some models work better than others with some countries preferring a specific model for economic or cultural reasons. However, the United States uses a free-market model without any government intervention naturally leading to high expenditures by the consumer because the government makes no attempt to regulate the market.  The best possible solution for the United States is to adopt a model lowering cost while providing quality care.

One of these models, the Bismarck health insurance model, is currently used in Germany, Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, and France, and according to T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America, this system is very similar to the free-market system used in the United States. We, as Americans, trust our doctors and our system as a whole excluding insurance companies and the Bismarck model lets us keep our medical system while reducing our costs through government-regulated competition in the free market. This model uses private health insurance plans financed by employees and their employers through payroll deduction. However, unlike our industry, the insurance companies are virtually non-profits; they are only meant to serve their customers, not shareholders. Additionally, strict regulation of fees gives the system clear cost-control measures, a problem that we face in the United States, and employers have regulations prohibiting them from attempting to deny employees coverage. With adoption of this new model, the United States would have the possibility to end the tyranny of insurance companies, regulate competition to provide the lowest costs, and finally have long-lasting reform to provide health insurance for all citizens.

Before I leave you today, I would like to relay a story that recently appeared in Newsweek of a woman whose husband suffered from cancer under our current system and the effects of the system even after his death.  For years, the Bennett’s had paid for their health insurance and played by the rules. Yet, for seven tough years, Terrence Bennett and his wife Amanda fought his kidney cancer visiting different doctors around the country with the same tests being performed multiple times. Over that period, Terrence had CT scans on 76 different occasions even though the doctors knew he was dying. After his death, Amanda calculated the costs of her husband’s care.  31% of their healthcare costs were spent on paperwork and administrative costs. Amanda was saddled with the costs of Terrence’s multiple hospital visits in excess of $35,000 because the insurance company simply refused to contribute. If this is our system and people are left with debt from “care”, how can we justify to ourselves that this is the right system? Our system is morally flawed, insurance companies will advance the interests of their shareholders, not customers and our costs will continue to rise. The reforms that have been proposed will help regulate the system, but the cost never goes away. I want you to think about how much you pay at your next visit to the doctor’s office or pharmacy just to see the system’s effect on every single person in this country, in this city, and in this room.