Wherein I Explain the Talking Point

jeffmiller:

Lots of people have health insurance through their employers. Most people are not completely satisfied with this health insurance, but many (particularly of libertarian or conservative persuasions) believe that the health insurance they currently have is better than what the government will ultimately provide. Many of these people also believe that government health insurance will cause employee plans to disappear, forcing them to sign up for the government health plan.

People are already losing their employer health care plans. Whether it is because they have been laid off or because their employer has scaled back their insurance options—meaning they are not offering it at all or they are offering, but employees are paying for the bulk of it now instead of the employer—a lot of people are losing health insurance through their employers. And for all the people who are self-employed or who work for smaller businesses (like yourself), employer insurance is sort of a moot point.

And for employers, it is entirely likely, even inevitable, that they will see people leave their plan for the plan offered by the government. However, the employers who will see their employees leaving in the largest droves will be those whose employees already have less than satisfactory health insurance. Whether those employees feel they are paying too much or that their insurance doesn’t cover enough or that the network of doctors and facilities available to them under their plan are dissatisfactory, employees will only be leaving plans that are already inadequate for their needs. They won’t be leaving already great plans for less appealing government ones. For employees at companies where their employers are providing good health insurance, the employers will have far less to worry about.

In my opinion, introducing a government plan as competition will encourage employers to find better insurance or to direct more funds to their benefits programs (as failing to provide insurance results in penalties for most businesses) and it will also encourage insurance companies to start being more competitive, not only on the plans they offer companies, but also that they offer on an individual level. And to be honest, I think we will see far more people who are already without insurance or who are struggling with individual plans choosing the government plan over extremely expensive individual plans, than we will see people with decent employer health insurance leaving for what might very well end up being a comparable or slightly lower quality government plan.

Regardless, I think people who are already receiving good employer-based insurance won’t be leaving, especially if the government plan is as bad as most on the right claim it will be.

Now, those on the left might say—hey, this is a crisis, everyone has to make a sacrifice … yes, your health coverage may not be as good as government coverage, but it’s more important to make sure that coverage is available to everyone. But here’s the deal … Obama isn’t just a guy with a good health plan; he’s a guy who will be worth tens of millions of dollars. So while the common man will likely be forced to sacrifice for sake of the currently uninsured, Obama himself isn’t going to sacrifice. He will still get the world’s best health care. It is easy for Obama to force others to make a sacrifice that he himself will not have to make. And because it’s so easy for him to do this, I (and others) believe that he won’t be terribly careful or considerate or respectful when this sacrifice is made. That’s why the anecdote matters.

But see, I can use the same anecdote the other way around. I feel like right now, the leaders on the right are saying, “Yes, we know this is bad, and yes, some of you don’t have access to health care or have access only to low quality health care, but for the rest of us who can afford it, we have really great health care! So why should we have to sacrifice our great health care so that you can have some health care or slightly better quality health care than that you are currently receiving?” This is the argument coming from the right, from politicians whose wealth is just as extreme as Obama’s, whose access to health care will remain in tact regardless of what happens. It’s easy for them to force the 1 in 6 Americans without health insurance to continue not receiving health care, because they aren’t those people. For all the Americans with employer-based health insurance, it’s easy for them to force the 46 million Americans without health insurance to continue not receiving health care, because they aren’t those people, either.

It’s easy for you (or even for me) to say, “I have health insurance and I am protected under the current way we do things, but I might not be if we changed the way we do things, so I think we should continue under the status quo even though we know, without a doubt, it removes tens of millions from the possibility of health care.” We have little at stake in the status quo. We have nothing big to worry about. But for the people who don’t have health insurance right now, it’s a big and almost constant worry, and they are being asked to sacrifice everything: not only their health, but also their financial situations and good credit and sometimes even their homes and their jobs. (This isn’t just a sad sob story you see on Dateline every once in a while either. I know many people who struggle with this on a daily basis.)

I have had health insurance my entire life, and I have a feeling that no matter what, I will always manage to find a way to cover it for myself. I recognize my privilege in this society, and I am willing to admit that I have been asked over the course of my lifetime to sacrifice very little to a society I personally get a lot back from. I know it’s not the same for everyone else, and that’s why I’m willing to accept that maybe my employer-based insurance will suffer (for a time) under a different system. My sacrifice in the long-run will be relatively small, compared to people who are already making huge sacrifices for the sake of a system that doesn’t privilege them in any way at all.

And while the question of sacrifice isn’t one we can ask of any of our politicians or any of the leaders of our society, because most of them are so wealthy as to make the question of sacrifice almost completely irrelevant, I can ask that question of those who live at about the same economic level (not wealthy, but certainly not poor) that I do. None of our politicians have to worry about sacrifice on the health care issue, and to make the argument that one side or the other has leadership more personally invested in the issue than the other is just ridiculous…which is why I really don’t get much out of the largely faux outrage over any politician’s lack of personal stake in the matter other than a sense of how absurd/irrelevant the argument is in general.