Obama Pitches Health Care Reform, but Falls Short in Areas

Well, I watched the one hour long Presidential News Conference that occurred this evening at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time or 8:00 p.m Eastern time. I will admit that I was very skeptical of what the president would end up talking about. One of his opening comments got me thinking and made me realize how broken out health care system really is. President Obama said that he received a letter from a woman in Colorado who had cancer. She told him that she paid over $700 a month for her health insurance and they would not pay anything towards her cancer treatments. This really opened my eyes.

President Obama did bring up some good points. One of the biggest of these is that if our insurance premiums and costs are not controlled, our economy will suffer. My father can definitely relate to the issue of rising insurance premiums. When he worked at his previous employer about a year and a half ago, he was paying over $700 a month for my mother, my sister, and me. Believe it or not, he was free. The insurance company he had was not very professional and did not pay for certain bills that were supposed to be paid for or did not pay the entire amount that they were supposed to pay. Something definitely has to be done.

President Obama did say that his bill would make it so that an insurance company would not be able to deny someone coverage because they have an existing medical condition. I have a medical condition and I am worried that I would be denied coverage by certain insurance companies because of an existing medical condition. Hopefully these occurrences will not happen to too many more people. President Obama also said that health care costs and rising premiums would slow in the long term if the bill was passed. The concern here is what number of years he is talking about. Is it a year, a couple of years, or by the time the next election rolls around?

Next, Obama said that the health care reform would save senior citizens thousands of dollars on prescription drugs. I am definitely for this. Senior citizens are on a fixed income and cannot afford to spend so much money on the medicines that they need. For instance, my grandparents take several medications each and they are on a fixed income. They have paid their debt to society and deserve as many breaks as possible.

I do agree with Obama when he says that there is a lot of "waste" in our health care system. Basically, he said that many doctors are paid for the quantity of care that they give and not the quality. In a lot of cases, people do not get anywhere near the amount of one on one time with their doctors. On average, patients get about fifteen minutes with their doctors. I have been one of those patients in the past. I also agree that some doctors make decisions based largely on fee schedules. For instance, many doctors will give people antibiotics when they probably don't even need them. If someone gets a bad cough, they will automatically recommend a chest X-Ray. The President gave an example where a kid may come in with a bad sore throat and jump to the conclusion that the child should get his/her tonsils out. The doctor may do this because he knows he would get paid more. This is not a good practice.

I will have to do more research on this, but Obama said that the people of the United States spend $6,000 dollars more on health insurance costs than people of other advanced countries who have people as healthier as or healthier than us. I really wish I knew where he was getting his sources. I am not totally denying the truth to this, but I wish he would say where he got this information. Then again, I wouldn't be totally surprised that we pay more than other advanced countries. The fact is that we have the highest obesity rate of any other country. Obesity leads to other health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other issues. A country that has over 60% of its population classified as being overweight is bound to have higher insurance premiums because a large portion of them have to go to the doctors for some of the other conditions that need treatment. Of course, the claims are sent to the insurance companies and the doctors get paid a healthy sum. More people need to take responsibility for where we are today in terms of the state of the health care system.

President Obama talked about how our economy was losing an average of 700,000 jobs per month at the peak of the recession. He said that this has started to turn around. He also brought up the stabilization of the banks and the extension of unemployment benefits. Of course, taxpayer dollars were used to bail the banks out. I was disappointed that he did not make a reference to the auto bailout which took billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars. Another disappointment came when he did not thoroughly answer a question that referred to Wall Street and all of the abuse that occurred before the financial meltdown. He was asked if he thought he should take a 'harder line' with Wall Street. He just said that what happened was very improper, but that he had to concentrate on preventing financial collapse. It was almost as if he just gave them a slap on the wrist.

President Obama was asked how the health reform plan would be paid for. He said that 2/3 of the cost of the plan would be taken care of by taxpayer dollars that are being spent right now. He made it clear that he did not want the other 1/3 to be put on the shoulder of middle class Americans and said that he would shoot down any proposal that tried to do this. He did say that he was looking into ways to make up the other 1/3 of the cost. One idea he gave was limiting itemized deductions. Now, this area of discussion sounded fishy to me. He did not get into the specifics on this topic. People are able to claim itemized deductions on a number of things (example: mortgages). People can even claim itemized deductions when they pay to clean their own work uniforms. Today, business owners can claim itemized deductions on the gas that is used to travel from one place to another. Does Obama mean that these types of itemized deductions will be limited or taken away altogether? If this is the case, it may put business owners in even more financial trouble. People may no longer be able to claim things that they were once able to.

There is another interesting statistic that was posted on CNN.com. A Quick Vote was posted and asked the viewers if they had health insurance or not. Of the 319, 664 people polled as of 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time, 88% said yes and only 12% said no. So, it appears that the issue is not that a large majority of people are without health insurance, but that costs for people who have health insurance are just too high. Perhaps that is what Obama needs to focus on. If costs of the health insurance are reduced, more people will be able to afford health insurance. Perhaps the amount of overhaul that he is asking for is not needed.

Something else Obama did not discuss is who wouldn't be covered under the plan. He said the plan would give coverage to 97-98% of Americans. That would be 291 million insured Americans. So, my question is who are the other 9 million? Are illegal aliens going to be eligible as well? I sure hope not. I'm not sure exactly how many illegal immigrants are in the U.S. today, but I heard some time back that it was somewhere around 6 or 7 million. Of course, Obama didn't say anything about these people.

I will admit that Obama is a good orator. Even though he made a few good points, I think he may be taking things just a little too far. Maybe our health care system does not have to be completely overhauled. Maybe, as some people think, we should just try to target the problems (especially the high cost).