Obama and gm healthcare

[Kshasty]

U.S. President Barack Obama has finally brought America closer to European universal healthcare systems. It took him almost a year to persuade Congress to approve his healthcare reform. The House approved it by a majority of only seven votes (219 to 212) on March 21. The amended bill will be submitted to the Senate but this will be a sheer formality, since the Senate is dominated by Democrats and the endorsement procedure has already been agreed upon.

The 44th U.S. president could sign the bill this week. He will then go down in history not only as the first black president, but also as the first "red" president: Obama's Republican opponents maintain that the bill is too socialist.

The European genes implanted into the American medical insurance system will not make it similar to that of Britain, Sweden or even neighboring Canada. Even Obama could not dare to be so radically socialist. However, his reform is truly historic, albeit only for America.

Europeans may mock it as pathetic since they adopted medical insurance systems decades ago. Russia also has such a system. Indicatively, one of the most vicious opponents of Obama's reform, Republican Devin Nunes, accused the bill of continuing the failed Soviet experiment. He was overly emotional but there is a grain of truth in what he said.

The gist of the reform is to introduce universal medical insurance on a par with federal (government) insurance programs, providing an alternative to private ones. The new law (it will come into force in 2014) will extend medical insurance coverage from the current 85% to 95%. In other words, another 32 million people who could not afford medical insurance will be covered by it. All in all, the U.S. state budget will spend $940 billion on it over the next ten years.

A spend of about $90 billion a year on medical insurance is not a huge sum for the world's richest country. Few people know but the biggest number of bankruptcies in the United States (as estimated by the Government Accountability Office) occurs due to the failure to pay medical bills (serious operations, treatment, etc). In order to pay these bills, patients or their relatives have to sell their houses and cars and are left destitute.

Moreover, the new law will prohibit insurance companies from refusing to offer insurance because of previous medical history, boosting insurance premiums (today they can increase by 40% per year) and denying coverage to the sick. Children will have the right to use their parents' insurance until they reach 26 years of age. Insurance costs will be controlled. Apparently, the socialist experience has proved too tempting to be resisted.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20100322/158280635.html