Spencer Cox and Mitt Romney say the quiet components about well being care and households out loud
Spencer Cox said the quiet part out loud.
Technically, it was the spokesmen for the governor’s office, the Utah Department of Health, and TestUtah who jointly let the cat out of his pocket. But it’s the same.
When asked why the TestUtah program to introduce COVID-19 tests to all comers hasn’t stopped charging everyone’s personal insurance or their Medicare or Medicaid accounts, the answer was simple and honest. Maybe more honest than intended.
Health insurance hinders health care. If your first priority is a healthy population, family, or person, don’t let the patient or provider go through a system of codes, forms, rejections, appeals, co-payments, deductibles, and limits.
These are health insurances, things that are not health care at all. At best, it is cost containment or cost sharing structured to benefit the insurer, not the patient and not the provider. And not our society as a whole.
I’ve never been comfortable with the phrase that health care is a human right. They know like free speech or due process. Health care is a public good, like public schools, fire departments, and libraries. These things are so good that in any semi-civilized society they are available by default to everyone, regardless of their solvency.
Stopping to review a patient’s health insurance information makes just as much sense as the 911 dispatcher asking for your homeowner’s insurance policy number before rolling the fire truck. So any nation we would consider the first world to do is not.
I’ve heard a couple of newscasts in London where a BBC reporter interviewed an American doctor or a healthcare wonk and tried to explain to a British guy how the U.S. health system works – or even make the argument that it always works a confusing event.
TestUtah was and is funded from the funds the state has received and will receive from the federal government as part of the various waves of coronavirus aid. It has had some problems and there is still no evidence that it was necessary to make it in a state that has a buzzing healthcare facility.
But the public funding angle is what you do when health is more important than money. When you are dealing with a highly communicable disease, the fact that testing one person is beneficial to society as a whole is obvious. But that applies to all health care.
Because of this, people who cracked the numbers conclude that Medicare for All would actually be cheaper – billions of dollars cheaper – than the existing system in terms of total national health care costs.
Mitt Romney said the quiet part out loud.
The U.S. Senator from Utah has honestly stated that the purpose of his proposed Family Safety Act, which would send monthly per child payments to most American families, is to encourage people to start families by making it easier for them to be raised Support families.
Other Republicans, including our other Senator, Mike Lee, oppose it, arguing that it would keep parents away from work. An odd attitude for people who are supposed to be for life and family as it is claimed that turning burgers late in the shift is more important to mom than helping her kids with their homework.
The opposition to both publicly funded health care and publicly funded child support stems largely from what has always stood in the way of the United States in First World status. It is the ingrained fear that some of the benefits will go to blacks and Hispanics, a fear so strong that many whites are willing to live in sickness and poverty themselves rather than helping the undeserved poor.
Romney started his life as a high-profile businessman, but if you count up running for Massachusetts and running for governor of Massachusetts, running for the U.S. Senate (twice), being a senator, running for president (twice) and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah directs, He has about as much public sector experience as anyone else.
He fuses the two worlds by understanding and promoting the idea that you have to pay for it if you want something. Bain Capital Romney may be comfortable with the standard American conservative idea that rich people are fools if they behave socially responsible without being rewarded. But Senator Romney does not argue that poor people should be expected to be socially productive without compensation.
Personally, I find it downright creepy that the government would encourage an increase in the birth rate. Our economy will be fine without them if we stop being afraid of all the Mexicans and Indians who are pushing to come here and work off their tails.
However many children we have, we all benefit when these families have financial and emotional support. And Mitt Romney says we should all pay for it.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) George Pyle.
George Pyle, opinion editor for The Salt Lake Tribune, is six months away from Medicare. The rest of you are alone.
Twitter, @debatestate
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