Cognitive Dissonance: The Healthcare Reform Battle State of Mind

It seems everyone in the healthcare reform movement is hitching up his or her britches and feeling mighty proud of the prospects for action under President Obama and the adoring Democrats in his Congressional arsenal. Even some prominent Republicans are inching ever closer to supporting change to the broken health system. But I'm feeling significant dissonance between the words spoken and the policy offered to move forward.

So listening to the speakers here at the Families USA Health Action meeting this week has been upsetting--OK, it is outrageous to watch these folks being self-congratulatory while also promoting those purporting the overhaul of the health system with the biggest bailout we've yet given any industry in recent months. The proposed mandates for all Americans to purchase private, for-profit health-insurance (or buy into a public pool that will be weakened by the insurance interests) is being sold to us as reform and it simply is not. And my brain hurts from the disconnect.

I cannot reconcile Princeton's Uwe Reinhardt's message that we've become an aristocracy--not a middle-class society or even a democracy--with his embrace of the insurance industry and expansion of the broken healthcare system that clearly provides better healthcare protection for our American royalty and not the peasants among us. He carefully charts for us the rising debt of American families--including crushing medical debt assumed under the for-profit health insurance based system-and the lack of savings by Americans in recent years. But there is little acknowledgement that some of the debt and lack of savings directly relates to the increased costs American families and workers must shoulder for health coverage--health coverage that doesn't adequately protect financial standing.