Thursday, July 16, 2009

Conservatives for Patients' Rights - Fearmongering Liars

I'm really busy this month with a big project, but I will take a minute to remark on the commercials being run by CPR. They've been on CNN during pieces about health care reform. These commercials use scare tactics to raise a fervor against a public health insurance plan. These commercials are misleading.

The one that comes to mind warns people that a public plan would put government bureaucrats between them and their doctors.
A) So what? That's better than having insurance company bureaucrats between people and their doctors. Insurance company bureaucrats do what they can to deny treatments. The government is proposing a public plan to increase the availability of care.
B) Good! As I've discussed before, doctors don't always follow best practices, and too often make uninformed, biased, ignorant decisions that could be prevented by informed oversight.
C) 47,000,000 Americans don't even get to see doctors right now, and the public plan would fix that. What stands between these people and their doctor is the absence of government involvement.
D) NO ONE IS FORCING ANYONE TO SIGN UP FOR THE PROPOSED PUBLIC PLAN. IT IS VOLUNTARY. IF YOU DON'T WANT IT, DON'T JOIN IT. There is no reason to oppose its creation.

The commercials also claim that the government would be financially wasteful, and cites other examples of government waste. This completely ignores the fact that the government-run health payers we already have (Medicare and Medicaid) are the least wasteful health payers, and are extremely efficient. In fact, many other corporate stoog... I mean Republicans are opposing a public insurance plan on the grounds that it would be so financially efficient that people would flock to it and private insurance companies would lose too much business. You can't have it both ways, conservatives. Stop with the obvious lies and misleading claims. Stop trying to convince the public to oppose what's good for the whole country just so you can keep collecting contributions from the insurance companies. Stop blindly believing that capitalism will make everything good, and start looking at the real world.