By Richard Davis
GUILFORD- In the coming months Vermonters will be subjected to lies and emotional tirades from those who oppose the direction in which health care reform is headed. Unfortunately, lies have become the accepted standard vehicle for political rhetoric in this country. The principle is that if you tell a lie long enough, people will eventually believe it.
I would like to make a pre-emptive strike because it is pretty clear which lies will be presented. The best place to find many of those lies is at the web site Vermonters for Health Care Freedom. The name of the organization is puzzling.
Here is a piece of their mission statement. “Vermonters for Health Care Freedom will educate the public and legislators about the damaging effects this legislation will have on Vermont’s economy and on our current, high quality health care system that provides coverage to more than 92% of all Vermonters.”
I can only assume they are implying that they are trying to shake free of the reform efforts in place in Vermont and keep the great system we now have. Polls clearly indicate that when those 92% of all Vermonters who have coverage are surveyed, the majority indicate they are not happy with what they have.
If you survey people who never use their insurance they will tell you about premium rates that increase by double digits every year. If you survey people who are unlucky enough to have to use their insurance, they will tell you about high deductibles and co-pays and lack of access to a primary care physician. They will tell you about being a slave to a job they hate because of the health insurance benefits.
Perhaps the most glaring omission from the Freedom web site is a plan that would replace the current proposals for reform in Vermont. It’s one thing to criticize people you disagree with, but if you can’t come up with an alternative then what kind of credibility do you have? The Freedom people only want to trash the current Vermont proposals and they are using lies to do so.
In the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page of their website they state that under Vermont’s current proposal there will be no private insurance companies. That is not true. In fact, we are federally mandated to create an insurance exchange that must include two private insurers. That is already being planned for.
If and when Vermont moves to a single payer system no one knows if we will ever eliminate private insurance companies. Because of the language of the federal health care bill we would need a waiver from the feds to have one insurer, which may or may not be a private insurance company.
The Freedom organization seems to mix and match criticism between Vermont health care bills and Federal bills and does not indicate, in many places on their web site, which bills they are referring to.
Another Freedom FAQ lie is that only one carrier will be available in the exchange. In fact, the federal law requires that there be at least two carriers. They also say you can’t purchase insurance outside the exchange and that is another lie.
There will be people who will not be eligible for the exchange and they will have to purchase insurance from other sources. They will include all of those people in self-insured plans whose employers choose to keep the coverage they have. Some estimates indicate that 40 percent of Vermonters will not be eligible for the exchange.
The Freedom FAQ section also goes on and on about new taxes for the new Vermont plan. What they don’t say is that whatever form of taxation is devised, most Vermonters will see their health care costs go down. They will pay new taxes, but they will no longer have premiums. Analyses indicate that if a Vermonter makes $75,000 or less, their overall health care spending will go down even though new taxes will be created.
The next time you hear any of these lies please ask the person presenting them what solutions they have. Are they satisfied with the current health care system? Would they actually be willing to work with proponents of a single payer system to talk about incorporating some of their ideas into a plan that we could all live with?
After all, the concept of the exchange and mandatory insurance were originally Republican ideas.