Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Critical Choices:  McCain vs. Obama, Pt.5 –- Security, Affordability, Portability and Sustainability; we need all these.

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On the other side, liberals are very concerned that McCain would de-stabilize the major backbone of our nation’s main health insurance structure that has stayed us for several generations now. They believe that eliminating employer-based health insurance would also “push consumers into a very expensive and even less regulated health insurance marketplace with a reputation for wanting to cover only healthy people.” The standpoint of most liberals is a “moral imperative” to provide health care to the tens of millions of Americans without health insurance as soon as practicable. The “moral imperative of the conservatives seems to be to wait until we have a health insurance system that is guaranteed to be sustainable.

Of course, both sides have valid points. Both agree that control of costs is a major key. While the liberals believe the power to do this is the clout that comes with numbers, like the “government connector” health insurance mechanism used in Massachusetts. The conservatives believe the power to control costs comes from individual competition. Both are right, again. But the ‘competition’ method may leave the door open to uncontrolled abuses concerning health insurance for the older and sicker who need it most. Without intervention, the open market could care less about their fate. In the end, the ultimate goal is to provide health care security that is affordable, portable and sustainable. If all Americans can’t have it, then it is not affordable. If it requires being employed then it is not portable. If it is not sustainable, then it is not tenable in the first place. Without the concerted effort of large numbers of American voters to get actively involved, the growing crises we face now is almost certainly guaranteed to hopelessly worsen.