Understanding (or not!) Obama's Health Plan

I’ve been participating in an interesting discussion with some Facebook friends and friends of friends regarding the topic of Obama’s health care proposals. There has also been a lot in the news recently about the topic. This coincides with my experiences of the past few days with hospitals, doctors, IVs, labs and all manner of medically related issues. In fact within the past year I’ve had intimate experience with just about every aspect of the medical community so I feel amply qualified to comment on it. My first and most vivid observation is the unbelievable level of misunderstanding on the part of so many people i.e , journalists, politicians, health care professionals, and just ordinary people about the concept of National Health Care in general and Obama’s goals in particular. I’ve discovered that rather than read about or listen to Obama’s proposals, most people immediately jump to the conclusion that his plan is the same as Canadian or European type national health care. These tend to be highly managed, somewhat inefficient programs that are not at all what Obama proposes. What Obama wants is something like Medicare which I happen to be on. Medicare allows me to go to whatever labs I want, whatever doctors I want and whatever hospital I want. Its role is to financially subsidize the decisions I make. I emphasize ‘subsidize’ because contrary to what people think it is not ‘free’. People should and do pay into it. It may be that we’ll have to pay more but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Medicare has overhead or administrative costs of about 5%. The private sector represented by HMO’s have overhead of sometimes in excess of 30%. And you think government’s inefficient?? Think again. Obama does not want government to take over the decision making process. He wants you to have choices. He simply wants to make sure people get the health care they need. Will it cost more? Of course it will. There’s no way to avoid that. So we simply have to pitch in and pay our fair share. A program like this will greatly benefit our nation and it’s the right thing to do.