Healthy Signs
On Friday afternoon –
i.e. three days ago – Rick Ungar posted an article on the Forbes website entitled, “The Bomb buried in Obamacare Explodes Today –
Hallelujah!”. A sensationalistic title, to be sure – but it turns
out that the content of the piece actually lives up to the title. In the
article, Ungar describes a provision of the new law that had previously escaped
my notice, and, as far as I can tell, that of most people – namely that from
now on, private insurers will be required to spend 80% (and in some cases 85%)
of the money collected through premiums on actual payouts to customers for
healthcare expenses, leaving only 15-20% left over for administrative costs,
marketing, etc. Then he drops his bomb:
“So, can private
health insurance companies manage to make a profit when they actually have to
spend premium receipts taking care of their customers’ health needs as
promised?
“Not a chance-and
they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these
insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we
should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system
for most Americans and thank goodness for it.”
If that really is
true – if we really are on the way to a single payer system – then I say
“Halleluja” indeed. And it seems that there are plenty of others who agree.
When I read the article online around noon on Monday, well over a million
readers had got there before me – 1,149, 023, to be exact. The next most
popular article that I can find on the Forbes website right now has about
250,000 views – an article entitled “Ten Happiest Jobs” (number one, in case
you’re wondering, is clergy member). So, an article about an obscure provision
of a healthcare law that may lead to a single-payer insurance system has
received more than four times as many views as an article that promises insight
into how to live a fulfilling life. The healthcare article also had 169,000
shares on facebook (which is how I first came across it), nearly eight thousand
tweets, and 742 shares on google plus (which may be the most remarkable of all,
since the most google+ shares I’d ever seen before was about 18).
Which is all to say –
wow, people really care about this. I shouldn’t be surprised, because I know I
care deeply about it. But the imperfect-but-better-than-nothing health care
reform law of 2010 has been so ineptly and tentatively promoted by its supporters,
and so effectively and viciously distorted by its opponents, and so poorly and
inaccurately reported by the media, that I was worried that the promise of
single-payer healthcare in our time had died with a whimper.
As new provisions of
the law kick in and people start to experience the actual benefits, Republicans
may find themselves regretting not just their opposition to healthcare reform,
but their effective characterization of it as “Obamacare”. It will be
interesting, in the years to come, to see how they retroactively attempt to
share the credit for it.