Publicly Funded Elections
by Bob Henderson
Chair, Kay County, OK, Democrats
His ability to complete healthcare/insurance reform properly was complicated by extreme partisanship. Republicans in Congress were determined to deny President Obama any accomplishments, regardless of any benefits to the nation.
The other complicating factor was the power of special interests, in this case, the insurance lobby.
The bill was publicly debated for months. While it includes many long-overdue reforms on insurance companies, such as putting a stop to annual and lifetime caps, requiring insurers to cover everyone and to spend 80-85 percent of premiums on actual healthcare, it stopped short of the key reform absolutely necessary to slow rising costs.
The public option.
Instead, we got the controversial mandate that all adults must purchase insurance. The mandate was the price Democrats paid to keep the powerful insurance lobby from defeating the bill entirely. With the government agreeing to subsidize insurance for those unable to afford it, the big companies won millions of new customers and, in fact, an indirect government subsidy.
To realize what a public option could have accomplished, all we have to do is look at Medicare, which was called a federal takeover of healthcare when it was passed by Congress.
Medicare was adopted because insurance companies did not want to cover senior citizens, who have reached the time in life when they face major medical expenses. Quite reasonably, they would sell policies to seniors only if premiums were sufficiently high to recover costs and still profit. That put health insurance out of the reach of most seniors.
But with Medicare covering 80 percent of the costs, companies were happy to insure the other 20 percent. Under this public/private system, since the mid-1960s older Americans have had access to the best medical care available.
Another key benefit of Medicare is that, due to government’s huge purchasing power, it is able to force healthcare providers to hold down costs. The public option would have applied this bargaining power across our entire population.
So where are we now? More Americans are covered, a primary goal of President Obama and the Democrats, but rising costs have not been adequately addressed.
How do Republicans propose to solve this continuing crisis?
In addition to voting to repeal Affordable Healthcare and lose all its insurance reforms that benefit middle-class Americans, every Republican in the House, and almost every GOP senator, has voted for a budget plan that would kill Medicare’s mandate of affordable healthcare for seniors.
This is the worst of all options, and is directly due to the power of special interests. Republicans and Democrats alike in Washington are financially dependent on special interests to finance their re-elections. No less than Tom Coburn has decried the fact that career politicians are more interested in their re-election than they are in solving America’s problems.
This gives special interests enormous power over the laws that are passed. We see it in healthcare, we see it in energy, we see it in the banking and finance industries, we see it in the power the military-industrial complex holds over our foreign policy.
We must break this stranglehold on Congress. Until we do, we will not have truly representative government able to tackle our problems objectively. Public funding of elections would allow our representatives to represent America’s citizens, instead of the special interests that now control their political future.
Public funding also can be adopted state-by-state. Oklahoma should institute this move toward more representative government, and deprive special interests of their power over our lives.