Spring Break
Letter to the Editor
Issue date: 11/3/09 Section: Opinion
Nathaniel French delivers several wrongheaded attacks on the public option in his editorial piece titled "Protect health care privacy" in The Daily Campus last Tuesday. These range from a slippery slope argument drowning in hypotheticals - the public option suddenly morphing into the dread specter of Uncle Sam himself, hovering over a woman's hospital bed and forbidding her abortion - to a confounding contradiction: government insurance being both so excellent that it puts every private insurance company out of business, yet so terrible that it results in stingily "rationed" care.
But perhaps the biggest problem with French's editorial is his framing of the issue. He portrays the public option as taking away a fundamental choice. This ignores the fact that many people have no choice to make.
Take Nikki White, for example, the subject of a recent piece in The New York Times. Diagnosed with lupus, a very treatable disease, she was systematically rejected by every insurance company due to her "pre-existing condition" until she died at the age of 32, unable to afford the medical care required to control her illness.
Take Christina Turner, recently interviewed in the Huffington Post, who was refused coverage for years because her rape was considered a "pre-existing condition." These and millions of others who desperately need care are turned away from private insurance companies, while healthy people pay premiums for their insurance and are oftentimes dumped by their insurance providers once they actually exhibit signs of sickness.
This is the status quo. To argue against reform and for continued "privacy" in health care, as French and others who take his position do, by claiming that a government insurance plan would result in rationed care, is to be either utterly blind to or willfully ignorant of the current situation in health care. What the private insurance companies are offering right now is not even care; among the 44 million uninsured, there is nothing even to ration.
But perhaps the biggest problem with French's editorial is his framing of the issue. He portrays the public option as taking away a fundamental choice. This ignores the fact that many people have no choice to make.
Take Nikki White, for example, the subject of a recent piece in The New York Times. Diagnosed with lupus, a very treatable disease, she was systematically rejected by every insurance company due to her "pre-existing condition" until she died at the age of 32, unable to afford the medical care required to control her illness.
Take Christina Turner, recently interviewed in the Huffington Post, who was refused coverage for years because her rape was considered a "pre-existing condition." These and millions of others who desperately need care are turned away from private insurance companies, while healthy people pay premiums for their insurance and are oftentimes dumped by their insurance providers once they actually exhibit signs of sickness.
This is the status quo. To argue against reform and for continued "privacy" in health care, as French and others who take his position do, by claiming that a government insurance plan would result in rationed care, is to be either utterly blind to or willfully ignorant of the current situation in health care. What the private insurance companies are offering right now is not even care; among the 44 million uninsured, there is nothing even to ration.
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