The Trillion Dollar Answer

By MICHAEL K. NORRIS

Let me get this straight: we have a popular president, 60 Senators – one of which used to write for Saturday Night Live - and a fat majority in the House of Representatives.  Yet somehow we might flat on our faces with health care reform.

 

The GOP couldn’t be luckier. They haven’t had to do anything new or innovative to rebut our arguments about how reform is necessary. Sure, we spend more and get less each and every year (the opposite of how a free market is supposed to work). Sure we have 46 million-plus people without insurance and one of every five people in an emergency room has no insurance. Sure, everyone has to navigate a maze of paperwork and voice mail trees just to be told their doctor’s visit won’t be covered because of a “pre-existing condition.”  But hey, a political victory is a political victory, and the strategy – that last worked in the early nineties – they are using is twofold:

 

1)      Dupe elected Democrats into believing the public doesn’t want health care reform (though many congressional Democrats were elected by promising to deliver health care reform).

 

2)      Scream that reform costs too much.

 

There is something we can do to combat step one and that is for you to call or write your representatives and tell them that you want health care reform. Then write a letter to the editor of a local paper explaining why you want health care reform. Then talk about health care reform with anyone and everyone. It’s too important to not discuss; especially with people who disagree with you about what this country needs.

 

Combating step 2 is pretty easy to think about when you get your mind right. Think of the scene in ‘Jaws’, when Richard Dreyfus wanted to take a photograph of the shark and Roy Scheider refused to stand on the gangplank in the foreground (“I need something in the foreground to give it some scale!” Dreyfus pleaded).

 

The GOP love using numbers that are big to scare people. The number we see in the press a lot is that health care reform is expected to cost $1 trillion over ten years.

 

That’s a big number. Until you remember that according to the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. had about $2.2 trillion in health care expenditures in 2007

Just one year. $1 trillion or even more over ten years is a comparative bargain, especially when you consider how much health care costs go up each year. And we already know most bankruptcies are linked with high medical bills, and when someone goes bankrupt there are a lot of negative affects that can’t be found in spreadsheets.

 

Not spending the money on reform is more expensive and dangerous than anything we’ve seen come out of congress so far this year, and that’s how we need to rebut complaints about the cost and keep from losing this debate once again.