Subscribe to Breaking NewsRuby-Sachs: Are We Going to Lose Health Care?
WASHINGTON - JULY 20: U.S. President Barack Obama (L) meets with healthcare providers at Children's National Medical Center July 20, 2009 in Washington, DC. According to reports, Obama vowed to press ahead with his healthcare reform legislation in the face of GOP criticism. (Photo by Martin H. Simon-Pool/Getty Images)
Canadians are accused of moral superiority a lot of the time. It’s obnoxious, really, the way many of us pretend to come from the land of honey and gold when talking to Americans (never mind that our Prime Minister is more conservative than the middle of the road President in the U.S.). But there is one arena where it’s hard to argue against a little Canadian smugness: health care.
I’ve had knee surgery in both countriesand spent my life visiting doctors and hospitals in Canada and using clinics in the United States. I’ve had health insurance in the U.S. and dealt with waitlists in Canada and I can tell you that, at the end of it all, my health card – issued by the Canadian government – is the most valuable thing I own.
So, when Obama vowed to take on health insurance companies I was skeptical, but excited. Then it looked like he was going to increase taxes to create a publicly funded health insurance option and I got a little excited (Canadians who make more than $60,000 per year, on average, pay five percent more in taxes on personal income than their American counterparts). And finally, the House Democrats proposed legally mandating businesses with more than $250,000 on their payroll to provide health insurance to their employees.
But then things got messy- townhalls were disrupted, death threats abounded and too many images of Obama looking like Hitler surfaced.
And now staunchly liberal Senators, like Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), are looking to push through any kind of health care reform even if it doesn’t include a public option.
This matters to the LGBT community. My general practitioner in Toronto works at one of the premier HIV clinics in the country. While she saw me once a year to make sure I was eating my wheaties, she also treats a large population of poor or homeless individuals who are HIV+. She encourages her patients to get tested, she screens them for aggravating infections, she educates them about safer sex, safe drug use and other methods to prevent the spread of HIV.
Her clinic is also located very near the LGBT neighborhood - a gathering place for LGBT youth who have been kicked out of their homes and have nowhere else to go. They can also walk into the clinic, get screened for STDs and get the kind of health care, including mental health referrals, that they need to survive without their families.
As a vulnerable population, LGBT Americans need publicly funded health care more than ever. We are more likely to be homeless, to think suicidal thoughts, to suffer job discrimination than our straight counterparts. We have less access to safe-sex information that represents our sex practices.
Last month, I went to the Howard Brown Health Center to get a basic STD screening (something we all should be doing regularly, but, let’s be honest, we all forget about/ put off). It’s a health clinic that specializes in LGBT health issues and fundraises to supply low cost or free services. They still charged me $95.00.
This is a disincentive for vulnerable members of our community to get the testing and medical help they need. That, in turn, puts us all at risk.
We need a public option for health care. We need to be willing to tax the richest among us a little more to get it. We need to be just a little more Canadian.
I don’t know why Obama insists on bipartisan support, he doesn’t need it. Anything that benefits America, especialyy when it comes from the democrats is always bad for republicans, so why waste time on them? Theirs is a party that thrives on negativity, they have no message, they are a party strictly based on far right ideology, a party of followers who can’t think anything through in a rational manner, let alone have respect for civic discussion. Obama’s bipartisanship approach is an exercise in futility and he’s falling into their trap to delay a vote which means “failure”, the m.o. and goal of the party of fear, hate, and no. He needs to address the nation NOW and spell it out loud and clear, responding to every accusation that has emerged at these disruptive town hall meetings. He needs to be more confrontational and single out the culprits in the republican party and the republican based organizations fomenting all this unrest and fear mongering, especially when it comes to medicare, a socialized health program that many of these disrupters believe is private health insurance. This is beyond the dumbing down of America.
Anastasie: Why don’t you want them to cover your surgery?
As a Transgender Woman in mid-america i cant even get health insurance even if i pay for it, I think that is wrong but there is nothing I can do about it. I dont want them to cover my surgery or anything but I feel like I should be able to get insurance to cover everything else just like most other normal americans get including my hormones and just general health care and fuck those rednecks that think otherwise. I am so hoping that this gets done because I have no other options.
Assuming they adopt the exchange model, and fail to include a public option, I don’t see how this will be worse for LGBT Americans than the current situation.
It may be slightly better, because it would make it easier for people to shop around and people buying health insurance through the exchange would get lower rates due to decreased overall risk for the insurance companies.
It wouldn’t be as huge of a step forward as if there was a public option, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Even a public option that isn’t taxpayer-funded at all would be beneficial because it could make the insurance market competitive again. The lack of competition in the health insurance industry is the cause of a lot of these problems. Inject (no pun intended) a major publicly-owned non-profit health insurance company into the mix and premiums would fall.
Oops,
This will stop thousands of companies that purposely keep workers under 35 hours so they don’t have to offer benefits. This way they will have to pay in one way or another.
The Walmarts of the world hold classes for employees on how to gain government benefits such as food stamps, charity care, etc. etc… They will have to contribute to the system whether or not they like it. Why should we Americans be forced to care for their workers because they wont?
No longer will they force the rest of us to provide care for the people that give their lives to the cheep ass companies just so they can lower the bottom line and give more back to their share holders.
A new system will make it much more fair for everyone and get the cost of it off the backs of middle income families. We’ve been squeezed enough and can’t take any more.
This is why the big companies want to stop it, they will be made to contribute fairly but of course they don’t want to.
I haven’t seen this part of the equation brought up yet but it is a very important part of the debate.
~Discuss~
Another thing to remember. In NJ everyone gets health care whether or not you are insured. The problem is that the taxpayers pick up the tab and the ones that seek charity care (the uninsured) don’t have to contribute anything. With reform at least they will have to contribute something to the cost of caring for them. Either through taxes on their salaries or payroll taxes on their employers.
It’s amazing that Americans make such a big deal about the big bogeyman of “rationed” healthcare. You think it’s not rationed now? What other name do you have for the cumulative effect of copays, pre-approval, specialist referrals, and lifetime caps on benefits?
There’s the claim that sky-high taxes will be required to pay for universal care. In the US, healthcare spending accounts for 16% of GDP, and it’s still going up. In Canada, it might be 10%. When you add non-tax healthcare spending to US taxes, it works out to a few percentage points less than Sweden, about as much as the Netherlands, and MORE than Canada. The money is already there, but it goes to insurance-company profits, pharmaceutical profits, lawsuit-avoiding tests with no medical necessity, and administrative costs that could already be slashed by simply requiring one basic data format for all Medicaid and Medicare providers.
There wouldn’t be as many malpractice suits if doctors would allow their peers to be weeded out–the incompetent, the addicted, the medically disabled (like surgeons whose hands are too unsteady to use a scalpel safely). That would cut the number of unnecessary tests, and would remove most of the contentiousness over tort reform.
Emma, wasn’t your “Canadian” health card actually issued by a provincial health plan (like OHIP in Ontario)? Please don’t let Americans continue fostering the mistaken belief that Canada has one federal medicare system, because it doesn’t.
I too have been watching the health care debate in this country with great interest. I have not had health insurance since October 2005 when my partner’s company decided they would no longer offer DP health benefits and cancelled my coverage. I also grew up in England where I didn’t have to worry about “being able to afford to go to the doctor.” I was hoping, and praying, that we would get something similar to, or at least at plan to get us to a “single payer” system in the United States. Because the Republicans (and a number of Democrats) are in the pockets of the insurance companies and their lobbying it seems we will get neither. I’m afraid that what we do get will be cosmetic changes to the current system and we will be back where we started.
When will people in this country realize that health care is a human right now a “nice to have!”
Who defines who is rich and who is poor? Sliding scales are a wise way to charge, though I agree that the more weathy one is, the more they should be required to contribute.
As for Canadian – I’m all for learning from that country to benefit our own. However, should we really want to take on all of Canada’s situations, perhaps we could simply take over Canada?