Clearly the battle for meaningful health care reform isn’t over, but yesterday’s vote in the House was a big step in the right direction.

The battle for meaningful health care reform NEVER BEGAN. And I’m guessing it won’t begin until the Democrats plan is put into practice and fails miserably like it inevitably will.

Washington is incapable of solving this problem and is only going to make it worse, exploding the deficit along the way. All this bickering is going on while unemployment hits double digits (despite a “stimulus” packaged that will add almost $800 billion to the budget deficit).

We’ve had partisan hackery all over the place, rhetoric and dogma, incredibly biased “studies” and data and absolutely no real honest debate and discussion about the problems and how to best fix them. Well at least by the politicians.

At this point, I really don’t care. The Democrats have the votes to do whatever they want. They have no interest in debate, or bipartisan support – and they don’t need it, so just get it over with already.

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Here’s the thing. Hospitals are required to provide essential services to anybody who walks in the door regardless of their ability to pay. For those without insurance, the hospital emergency room becomes the only option, even for non-emergency conditions. ER visits also happen to be (next to ICU), the most expensive type of provided health care. When the patient can’t pay, guess who does? We all do, indirectly. On the other hand, a person with health insurance has access to the family or general practitioner outside the hospital where costs are far lower. (Which also improves the chance of preventative medicine, but that’s another thread.) When all eligible citizens participate in some kind of managed health plan (private or public) then the cost of treating the uninsured (theoretically) disappears. We all win in that scenario. And that’s just one example.

The republicans don’t have a problem with mandatory participation. But they want to keep it entirely private within the health insurance companies. And that’s a non-starter, since there would never be any assurance that it would ever be affordable. There’s no checks or balances in a monopoly or even a duopoly.

Make no mistake, health insurance companies will continue to thrive and make lots of profits for their shareholders AS LONG AS they are willing to find better and more efficient ways to provide their services. But that will require big changes to business models for these behemoth companies. The steadfast refusal of these companies to even contemplate such change has angered me more than anything in this whole debate. Instead of coming to the table with workable alternatives, these utterly lazy companies have simply thrown tens of millions of dollars (yes that’s our money, too) at our legislators (who were elected to SERVE THE PEOPLE) to preserve the failed status quo. It has been the actions (or lack therein) of these health insurance companies that have brought us to the point where we are now.

What a public option does (and I’m no big fan of single payer, which btw should not be confused with public option) is open the playing field of competitiveness. Insurance companies will have decisions to make. Do they go after the population that opts for the public option? Do they innovate to stay ahead of the trends? Those that do adapt will continue to provide returns to their investors.

This country rose to greatness through innovation and adaptation, not by adhering to the status quo. I guess I’ll leave it there for now.

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