Reply #58: Have you [View All]

[sweetapogee]

ever considered offering your services as a constitutional authority to the Obama administration?

Not to be a pain or anything but one of the things that troubles me about the current debate is that we are talking about mandating the purchase of HEALTH INSURANCE, not HEALTH CARE. The problem isn't the availability or the delivery of the service it is the financing of the service. Modern health care is a service. It is hard to imagine that the federal government could force a person to purchase the means to finance a service that it cannot force the person to consume. Once you answer that question another comes to mind.

Medicare as currently configured, depends mainly on private service providers accepting a number of medicare patients knowing that the payment is lower than that of private insurance patients and balancing the two out. I have not seen an argument (not saying there isn't one) that gives the conditions where everyone is on an insurance program like medicare which allows for the continuation of private health service providers. Without that continuation, my biggest question would be how over the long term does the government (local/state/federal) finance and retain the actual providers of the service? One of the key ingredients of the current HCR package is the promise that individual consumers will retain the right to keep the provider of their choice. From a constitutional perspective, how does the government force an individual to train for a profession in the medical field and stay current with all of the continuing education required to remain in the field? How would the government pay for the purchase of all the capitol equipment necessary to provide the service?

So, I think to answer the question in most minds as to why the current HCR package has a reliance on the existing private health care infrastructure is because the cost of acquiring a government owned infrastructure would simply be unacceptable to the public at this time. This is a hugh problem that the current HCR package doesn't address. What is needed is a discussion as to the how we will resolve this issue. Even if every last private health insurance company in the country gives it's assets to the government, it still doesn't answer the question of how the government acquires the infrastructure and or finances the continued operation of the industry.

If individual states decide to provide it's people with health insurance I suppose each state would have to decide if the vehicle of financing the insurance meets the constitutional requirements of that particular state.

Perhaps I think too deeply into things, that is a real possibility. My questions come from a legal perspective, not a practical or needs based perspective and is not intended to re-hash the already established need to reform the industry. I cannot help but think that the reason the Obama administration took the route it did was it felt that it would give the best chance of approval, not workability.