Monday, June 5, 2017

Twenty questions for politicians about healthcare



Editors Note: The following material has been provided to me by my sister Eileen Gleason.  Eileen is a retired federal prosecutor and has also been a judge and in private practice.  She lives in Louisiana which currently has extremely serious problems with health care finance.  I thought that the points she made in a recent letter to a Louisiana newspaper might be generally applicable and useful points to think about concerning our health care situation in Minnesota.

Primary Reference:  Eileen  Gleason, Twenty questions on GOP insurance, The Advocate, May 31, 2017.
link: https://goo.gl/Sok8t3


Twenty Question for Politicians About Healthcare 

1. Who asked you to strip health insurance from 23 million Americans? Really, exactly who? And why? 
2. Do Americans want the freedom to not have insurance they cannot afford?  They had this freedom all their lives and didn’t like it. 
3. Why hand out windfalls to the wealthy? Why not write a bill providing the most protection using funds available without a tax cut? 
4. Why not fix the problems with the ACA? Why throw the baby out with the bathwater just because the baby was dubbed Obamacare?
5. Why rush to vote without a Congressional Budget Office score? Now that it is out, why not repudiate this bill? 
6. Do those with mental illnesses want no coverage for mental illness or lifetime coverage limits? 
7. After this bill, who will care for the uninsured mentally ill? Prisons? Homeless shelters? 
8. Why abolish the Medicaid expansion, which allowed life-threatening conditions to be diagnosed and treated, and saved lives? 
9. Why shift the risk of the expanding population and increasing healthcare costs to  Louisiana, which is in dire straits without the burden of reduced Medicaid funding? 
10. The experience of states with underfunded high-risk insurance pools is not good. Will you commit to adequately fund these pools? 
11. Instead of spreading risk through insurance, why are you isolating people in high-risk insurance pools? 
12. Why allow discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions, when 30% of Louisianans have one? 
13. Why leave it to fifteen MALE Republican senators to negotiate behind closed doors about this important issue? Why are birth control and maternity services in jeopardy? 
14. Why defund women’s health services at Planned Parenthood, while funding treatment of men’s health conditions, (erectile dysfunction, prostate cancer), without limiting where men can be treated? 
15. Why are Republicans threatening to withhold cost-sharing insurer subsidies and destabilizing the insurance marketplace? 
16. Why let insurers charge the elderly five times the premiums charged to the young? 
17. Why permit the sale of policies which do not cover the current essential health benefits, thereby sharply increasing costs to those covered? 
18. Why are the AMA and AARP, among others, against this bill?  
19. How about a waiting period of one week between finalizing the Senate bill and voting on it? Are you afraid of the feedback? 
20. Many Republicans refuse to hold town hall meetings. Is that because their constituents get mad at them and yell at them?  Ask yourself why constituents get mad and yell.  
Please vote “NO” on the House bill, or I will ask, “Why again did I vote for my senator?” and “What other candidate can I support in the next election?”
The twenty questions are available for download as a pdf document.