This from today’s Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Medical care is important. But of all our basic needs, even medical care comes in a notch below food. Most of us could survive longer without health care than without food.
So, why not create a government-run “public grocery store option” to compete with private grocery chains, just as President Barack Obama wants to create a “public option for health care” to compete with private insurers? President Obama says a public option would keep insurers more “honest,” lest they make what he considers “too much” profit.
But if that’s true for insurance, why not for groceries? If health care is a “right” to be guaranteed to tens of millions of Americans by a “public option,” then shouldn’t government set up grocery stores to compete with private grocers?
That was evidently the point that John Sorrow, Mid-South region president for Cigna Healthcare, made during a recent Times Free Press forum at Erlanger Hospital.
“Do we need a publicly run grocery store to keep Bi-Lo and Publix and Wal-Mart honest?” Mr. Sorrow asked. “I would contend that we don’t need it in health care either.”
He warned that a government-run plan that does not actually face the cost of patient care leaves everybody holding the bag.
“What you create is a death spiral of people that are going to fall out of the private plans and into the government plans, which is going to leave all of us in peril financially,” Mr. Sorrow said.
In understandable concern about rising medical costs, Congress unfortunately is risking imposing far greater costs upon us all through ObamaCare.
I’ve written about the health care debate here recently. http://tammyr2.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/an-apple-a-day-if-it-were-that-simple/
I don’t even know if I have anything else to say, but things like this upset me to the core.
Here’s why in a nutshell:
1. He’s a health care CEO. Of course he is opposed to any change that might limit the out of control profits of health care corporations and insurance companies.
2. This isn’t funny. Going without food isn’t something to joke about. The statistics on the number of Americans, and American children, who go to bed each night hungry and with no idea when they will eat again, are unconscionable and the numbers are on the rise daily. Don’t make jokes about a public option grocery store-until you’ve had to stand in line at a food pantry to feed your child, or you’ve gone to bed hungry.
http://feedingamerica.org/default.aspx?SHOW_SHOV=1
3. His facts are all wrong. T here isn’t an ObamaCare plan. The White House has not formulated any plan. It is leaving that up to Senate/Congress-and they haven’t even come up with a specific plan. And ANDANDAND, there is NO PLAN for “government run health” currently on the table. But, we already HAVE such-it’s call MEDICAID. And while Medicaid may be a flawed system, it has managed to provide health care coverage for American seniors for years, many of these same people are screaming out against “government health care”.
4. Yes, “most of us” could “survive” without health care, in fact a lot of Americans are doing just that-surviving. I just think that in a nation such as ours we shouldn’t be talking about mere survival of our citizens. How about thriving? What’s so wrong with that?