Why Missourians Should Have Defeated Missouri Proposition C, 2010

Missouri Proposition C in 2010 was powerfully passed by about three quarters of the Missouri voters. However, not only does the proposition fail to actually make any real changes to the federal health care laws recently enacted, the voters may have gotten this wrong. As a voter who voted against proposition C, I can see a number of issues that seem to have vanished in the ground swell aimed at passing it.

Across Missouri both urban and rural, hospitals routinely give care to patients for which the hospital will never receive compensation.

Under a national health care plan, this scenario should never happen. There is no evidence that care will be denied to these patients under the new plan. In fact, with universal health care in place, hospitals should receive far more revenue than they do presently.

Additionally, because all health care providers should be participants in the plan, patients will not have to worry about whether a hospital accepts their brand of insurance.

This is a problem that is far more prevalent that is generally mentioned. Personal experience has shown that hospital emergency rooms will not reveal whether they participate in your insurance plan until after service is rendered. This means that patients can be left holding a very large bill to cover the costs of very little service. One trip to the emergency room that is not covered by insurance can cost thousands of dollars.

Waiting periods for health care coverage and benefit denials for pre-existing conditions should vanish.

Everyone knows that when you change jobs, you can go without health insurance for three or more months. If you are forced to switch from a group to an individual plan, attachments to the policy will prevent you from receiving payment for any health care judged by the insurance company to be pre-existing. Inflated rates for past medical conditions will also be eliminated with universal care.

The states already compel people to buy car insurance, wear seat belts, use car seats for children, and numerous other things.

No one seems to really complain that the other person has to carry liability insurance when that person hits their car. In fact, people are more than willing to throw the book at violators of the car insurance rules. You can ticketed for failing to wear a seat belt or not strapping a child into a safety seat. Referendums are not being touted to vanquish these into oblivion. More that likely, once universal health care is fully in place, the same attitude will prevail about it that now exists for car liability policies.

Much of the country already receives health care funded by tax dollars.

All government employees receive publicly funded health care purchased from a private insurer. The same is true for teachers and all educators and staff at public schools, colleges, and universities. Medicaid and medicare recipients get government provided health care. Medical professionals who derive most of their income from medicaid and medicare also are getting publicly funded health care.

Those in the military and their families all receive federally funded health care.

People who work for companies whose main customers are the federal government, like defense contractors, all get their health care paid for by the taxpayer. While many of these are receiving federal health care indirectly, they are indeed getting their medical needs met with public monies. Many other individuals get at least some of their health care from the public because of income from other government spending with their employers. When these are all added together, the percent of the American people already receiving federal health care is huge.

On the other end of this argument are those people who have to buy individual or small group policies with extremely high deductibles.

I have a personal acquaintance who made too much money to get medicaid, but not enough to buy a superior health care policy. With about a $5,000 deductible and not a lot of personal resources, he avoided seeing a doctor about a problem until his colon cancer had spread too far to save his life. With a universal care policy in place that everyone participates in, he would probably have sought earlier treatment and not have died after only six decades of life.

Many people in the United States continue to work with health issues and old age to get health care coverage.

Because insurance companies refuse to cover pre-existing illnesses and conditions, many with arthritis, diabetes, back problems, and legions of other health concerns are trapped in jobs due to fear of losing their health care insurance. The price of Cobra policies is sometimes too high for these individuals to afford. Even if they can afford it, Cobra is only a short term solution to maintain coverage between jobs. If the gap between jobs is too great, the insurance will be lost.

This list goes on and on, but the need for a national health care policy has been around for decades.

Although there are horror stories from England and Canada, it might be interesting to know a few of the positive outcomes of their health care systems. In all probability, for every one horror story, there exists scores of good stories. But, these stories do not sell newspapers, play well for politicians trying to gain seats in Congress, or excite insurance companies and health care givers trying to increase the bottom line.