Baiting the Trap for Liberals

The health insurance industry launched a pre-emptive strike onr insuring the uninsured yesterday. Their chief lobbying organization proposed expanding Medicaid, and giving tax breaks to people earning up to $60,000 a year to buy insurance. Here's the crucial paragraph from Robert Pear's New York Times story:

The industry did not say how its proposals would be paid for; did not recommend any budget cuts or tax increases; and did not say what, if anything, it would do to slow the growth of health costs.

Let me see if I have this right: The insurance industry would like to see the middle class and upper middle class continue to pay greater sums out of pocket as their employers shift the rising cost of premiums to their employees; raise taxes on those same people to expand Medicaid, which is half funded by the states and half by the federal government; increase the federal deficit by giving tax breaks to the near poor to buy inadequate health insurance; and do nothing to hold down overall health care costs, which is, supposedly, the health insurance industry's job.

I have great admiration for Ron Pollack at Families USA, whose organization is a tireless champion for people without health insurance. But his warm welcome of the insurance industry's opening gambit on NPR last night and in today's Times should not be echoed by other, more sober voices in the progressive community. Pitting the middle class against the poor and uninsured is not a winning solution. It's bad economics and, more importantly, bad politics.

It's not even good for health care. The coming battle over health insurance reform most also include a frontal assault on the weaknesses of our health care system, which ignores preventive care and public health and wastes its resources on expensive technologies that add little if anything to the nation's overall wellbeing. Getting rid of waste -- insurance company waste and medical system waste -- is the key to achieving affordable, quality health care for all without bankrupting us all.