Health care questions for your legislators

[eridani]

Note that these all require specific answers, and leave few options for mom and apple pie generalities. You’ll probably get that sort of thing in a return letter, but obfuscation is usually much harder when you ask the questions in person.

For those favoring a public option—

1. What are you going to do to guarantee that a public option does not become an underfunded dumping ground for poor and sick people?

2. Will you insist that a public option be open to anyone?

3. Will you insist that a public option be administered like Medicare?

4. Given that even the best public option provides only 9% of the savings of single payer, why are you not using single payer as at least a starting point?

5. Why are private insurers complaining about competition from a public option when Fedex and UPS successfully compete with the post office, bookstores with public libraries, and private life insurance with Social Security survivors’ benefits?

In general—

1. What is your objection, if any, to having the Congressional Budget Office evaluate HR 676, HR 1200 and S 703?

2. If you favor competition, does that mean you want an effective public option to be available in rural areas that currently have a monopoly of a single private insurer?

3. If having a lot of competing health plans will solve our health care financing problems, why do we even have such problems at all now, given that we already have thousands of competing plans?

4. Do you think that health care is a public good, like roads, schools and the fire department? If not, why not?

5. If competition enhances the provision of public goods, why don’t we have competing fire departments and police departments?

6. Would not competition between health care practitioners improve quality of care, rather than competition between plans?

7. Why do we need many plans with different kinds of benefits rather than one plan for everybody where all medically necessary services are covered?

8. Do you favor regulating private insurance by requiring them to accept everyone at the same rates regardless of health status?

9. Do you favor forcing everyone to buy private insurance which will deplete your savings by thousands of dollars before any claims are paid, thus possibly making you one of the 70% of medical bankruptcies now experienced by those who already have such insurance?

10. If you favor forcing everyone to have private health insurance, what recourse will we have when our health or our lives are threatened by denial of claims?

11. Do you favor making it illegal for private insurers to revoke health insurance policies?

12. What value do insurance companies (or proposed “co-ops”) add by creating thousands of small risk pools, given that the biggest and cheapest risk pool is the entire population?

13. Do you think that the needless fragmentation of provider lists, which forces people to constantly change doctors when their employer changes plans or they change their employment status, has any relationship to the fact that the US has the industrialized world’s largest rate of medical errors?

14. I would like to read you two statements by conservative think tanks, one from 1993 and the other from 2008.

• In 1993 conservative pundit Irving Kristol advised the GOP that the Clinton proposal “should not be amended; it should be erased,” because “it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests.”

• In 2008, the Cato Institute has stated that “blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival. If Obama succeeds in passing health care, then people who might have been conservatives will like it, and will be more likely to vote for the people who passed it.”

Given these statements and Republican behavior during the stimulus package debate, why would Democrats bother to consult with Republicans at all on health care?

15. Senator Grassley has stated that the fact that 119 million people would choose a public option is precisely the reason that they shouldn’t have it. Do you agree with that logic? Why?

16. If so many people want a public option, who, exactly, do the opponents of the public option represent?

17. Given that we already spend twice as much per capita as other industrialized countries do for health care, why is anyone proposing that we need to spend even more to take care of everybody?

18. If you think that incremental changes are the way to go, why not just lower the Medicare eligibility age every year by five years until everybody is covered?

19. What are you doing to remove the Medicare Part D provision that Medicare administration is not allowed to negotiate bulk price discounts?

20. Do you think that legislators who oppose a public option should have their own “government health care” taken away from them?

21. If Congress votes to tax existing health care benefits, do you expect a repeat of 1994 in 2010, with union members not donating or volunteering—just voting and leaving it at that?

22. Are you a co-sponsor of HR 676, HR 1200 or S 703? If not, why not?