Obama Details Socialized Health Care

President Obama met with Congress yesterday to discuss the details of his socialized health care plan. The President campaigned last year on his aspirations to reform the health care system in the United States and has wasted no time. He has been discussing a plan to allow Americans to buy into a government insurance plan. Some rumors say that the President plans to make this plan mandatory with hefty penalties if not purchased and adhered to.

Obama sent a letter to Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Senator Max Baucus of Montana, chairmen of the two committees he is working with to draft the health care plan. (Kennedy’s committee only includes democratic senators and Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, an independent.) Obama has supposedly initiated dialogue that makes the plan a law, requiring every American to purchase health insurance of some kind, the government plan at the very least, but requesting a “hardship waiver” for those in poverty that cannot afford the related costs.

Obama wrote in the letter, “The plans you are discussing embody my core belief that Americans should have better choices for health insurance, building on the principle that if they like the coverage they have now, they can keep it, while seeing their costs lowered as our reforms take hold.” President Obama made it clear during the 2008 Presidential election campaign that his main influence for health care reform was the death of his mother, Anne Dunham, in 1995 from cancer, after watching her struggle with greedy insurance companies and high costs.

During a debate with Arizona Senator John McCain, his opponent in the election, in late 2008, he stated his heath care plan very simply, “I think it [health care] should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills – for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying this might be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong with that.”

Covering 50 million uninsured Americans could cost as much as $1.5 trillion over the first ten years of the plan, a cost that opponents of the plan are just not willing to allow taxpayers to pay out. Obama did not offer any solutions to curb those costs though he did mention that he would like to “borrow” an additional $200 billion to $300 billion over ten years from Medicare and Medicaid, a common government action, something many tax experts call “stealing from the elderly”.

Opponents of the plan also question the quality and time efficiency of a socialized health care plan. Hilary Clinton was a major supporter of health care during her husband’s tenure as president, something opponents referred to as “Hilarycare”. The same opponents are fighting it now for the same reasons: In countries where they already have similar health care plans, they are paying three times less than Obama’s plan will supposedly cost and studies have shown that quality will be low and that major surgeries, especially organ replacements, will take years of going through a waiting line.