White House's Approval of "Healthy Indiana Plan" Receives Scorn

On Friday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called the Bush Administration's approval of the "Healthy Indiana Plan" "misguided" and "disappointing".

The Center says that the plan does little to address the needs of low-income, uninsured people in the state and has little chance of decreasing the number of uninsured Indianans.

The plan is intended to extend health coverage to low-income adults whose incomes are less than twice the poverty line, which is taken to be $20,000 per year for an individual. However, says the Center, not many low-income adults could afford to secure or maintain the coverage due to the fact it involves high fees.

The Center cites the fact that when the state of Oregon was given federal approval for raising their similar plan's premiums for qualified people to $240 per year, about 50,000 people could not afford those premiums and surrendered their health insurance.

Indiana's premiums would be $500 a year for most qualifiers.

Critics of all such plans, however, say that the real problem with government-implemented health insurance plans is the government itself, even as several Presidential candidates are selling the increasingly health insurance-burdened American public on the idea of what is essentially socialized medicine.

But, say the critics, socialized medicine is more like what we have right now, and we lack authentic health insurance and the healthy competition that keeps prices down and quality up in other areas of society.

Some economists have opined that only approximately 10% of all Americans have "real" health insurance.

According to economics and the insurance industry, all types of "real" insurance, no matter what they insure, are characterized by inexpensive premiums, and infrequent but large or "catastrophic" claims. Most types of insurance are also characterized by relatively large deductibles before their coverage comes into play.

These traits, however, are non-existent in most American health insurance plans. Instead there are frequent, and typically small, claims, and excessively high premiums. Because of this, it has been said that American health care coverage is really health "insulation" instead of health insurance.

Critics of this kind of health care say that it is clearly a disaster. Patients do not see their own money leaving their own wallets because deductibles are very low and sometimes non-existent, and because most insured Americans don't even pay for their own premiums out of their pockets; and as a result they uncritically accept doctors' recommendations for treatments, prescriptions, or further processes that are very frequently unnecessary but which still fatten the bank accounts of health care providers.

A recently published study financed by drug giant Pfizer, Inc. concluded that if Americans had their group level of health literacy sufficiently raised, they would become very critical of doctors' recommendations and would compare different doctors, creating healthy competition that would force doctors and health care providers to give only top quality. Americans would also stop demanding the over-medication that is the biggest driver of higher health costs, and would instead adopt preventive measures for a fraction of today's costs.

Health care experts who reviewed the study said that such literacy would set off a chain reaction that would lead to health insurance becoming affordable for every American.

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