Deaths Caused by a Thousand Cuts, and the Coming Advent of the Zombie Customers

Trust me, this guy, Sandy LeonVest, was very on point in this great and thorough article about the demise of health care reform in general and especially the public option in particular, both of which died a death caused by a thousand cuts during 2009. This is to my way of thinking a must read article.

UNITY-PROGRESS COMMENT
All I had to add to the article was a relatively minor complaint about a quote made by Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates:

"According to Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, the current House proposal works pretty well for families making $20,000 or $30,000 a year. "A family making $27,000 a year will pay about $1,000 (annually) toward their health insurance," he told Jim Lehrer on PBS' News Hour."

Um, what about the co pays and the deductibles? The House bill does NOT work for families in that $20,000 to $30,000 income bracket, except for those who don't get any actual health care. It doesn't work positively for any income brackets except for those under 133% and for, you guessed it, those with high incomes, say 8 or 10 times the poverty threshold and up. High income people are always, to one extent or another, immune from suffering from the effects of public policy failure.

The huge health insurance corporations are counting on a large number of people to be too tapped out after paying the health insurance premiums and from paying all the other taxes and basic costs of living to actually dare to get health care and to face paying the deductibles and co pays under the policies they were forced to buy by the American right wing government.

These captive customers will be like "zombie customers". They will pay their premiums but won't access health care except under full scale emergencies. So we are talking about a lot of new cash cows for the mega health insurance companies, which will, at the least, roughly offset the costs to the health insurance companies of having to actually pay for care for the really sick who somehow get insurance for the first time.