The Great Health Care Takeover

As Compared to Health Insurance

During an apparently unplanned moment of candor at his press conference on July 22, 2009, President Obama seems to have accidentally “tipped his Health Care hand.” He did so by honestly answering a question from Ms. Jane Strum about how he would have handled a health care situation faced by her mother. The primary physician had recommended that her then 100-year-old mother receive a pacemaker. The cardiologist said she was too old; fortunately, a second cardiologist agreed with the primary physician. In the event, her Mom got the pacemaker; mom is still vibrant and “still kicking around” at 105.

In contrast, the President essentially told Ms. Strum that under his plan, her mother would have gotten pain pills and been told to “go home and die.” Does that last seem a bit acerbic? Perhaps one might better paraphrase the comment as, “Dr. Obama says, ‘Take two aspirin, and don’t call me in the morning--or any other time! {deleted, see addendum}.’”

President Obama insists he wants everyone “to have coverage”—an insurance term, incidentally. His answer to Ms. Strum highlights the sharp contrast between his proposed Health Care Takeover and actual “insurance”:

in·sur·ance

2. a. Coverage by a contract binding a party to indemnify another against specified loss in return for premiums paid.

More generally, for almost four thousand years, insurance has meant that one party assumed some of another party’s risk of loss in exchange for money in advance:

The Babylonians developed a system which was recorded in the famous Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BC, and practiced by early Mediterranean sailing merchants. If a merchant received a loan to fund his shipment, he would pay the lender an additional sum in exchange for the lender's guarantee to cancel the loan should the shipment be stolen. (See the History of Insurance caption in the linked article.)

Does President Obama really want everyone “to have coverage?” If that were true, the plan would spell out the all risks it was taking on, and those it was not. Moreover, since the plan forces everyone into the System, one would expect it to “cover” any and all risks now covered by our “broken, profit ridden, greed plagued, and inefficient” health insurance system. His accidental moment of candor shows that President Obama has no plan to cover all the risks currently assumed by insurance. In fact, no one can know which risks the government will cover at any given moment.

Clearly, the President has no more intention insuring anyone than he has of resigning his office. Instead, he wants to force everyone into a system of capriciously dispensed medical care; a system that will definitely include “go home and die” for some; and inferentially, “go home and suffer” for others.

Whatever you choose to call the President’s plan, please do not call it “insurance.”

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Addendum: Reflections upon some acerbic comments

We ought to recognize that in his rather callous remark, President Obama breached an extraordinarily difficult point: an enormous percentage of a person's lifetime medical spending occurs in the last months of life. No compassionate society seems to have dealt effectively with that seemingly intractable issue; thus, Medicare is actuarially bankrupt; and European economies stagnate under almost unbearable tax burdens. At the same time, scrapping the current, admittedly flawed, essentially market based system for a "pig in a poke" patterned on flawed European models that have met with enormous difficulties does not seem wise.

A couple of acerbic terms:

• "apparently unplanned moment of candor"
  



• "accidental moment of candor"




President Obama has become well known for carefully choosing his words. Telling someone, "I would have sent your mother home to die" while trying to sell a health plan seems quite uncharacteristic of either the President or any salesperson. In addition, the comment seems clearly more candid than President Obama's typical style. Thus, while somewhat harsh, the two phrases seem fitting enough.





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