Chattanooga Pulse

While many of the recent town hall meetings held by U.S. senators and congress members have made front-page news for their vitriol and wildly inaccurate claims made by citizens, this past Monday’s meeting in Cleveland chaired by former Chattanooga mayor and current U.S. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) was far more civil.

Whether or not many members of the audience truly understood what was—and more importantly was not—being proposed by President Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, was not as clear.

“There are many reasons people don’t have health insurance. When we go about trying to solve the problem, you have to look at each situation,” Sen. Corker said. “There are some things the government can do to help organize, but what we need to do is help organize choice for people to actually buy private health insurance.”

It is well understood that the current healthcare system in place in the United States is among the most expensive and least effective among industrialized nations.  The disparity of care available for the “haves” and “have-nots” is often staggering.  In the past decade, nearly 50 percent of personal bankruptcies and home foreclosures have been directly related to massive medical bills that people, even people with basic health insurance, have been unable to pay.

At the same time, employer-provided health insurance has become far more expensive for both business owners and employees while coverage has been drastically reduced.  At the same time, more and more people are being denied coverage because of “pre-existing conditions” that leave them few-to-no options when they need medical care.

Figuring out what can be done to solve the myriad of problems facing American healthcare is far from simple.  But setting aside all the various plans being proposed and debated by the three House and two Senate committees currently working to develop a final bill, the core questions remain simple: Can we afford the cure, and should the government be involved?

“Before we expand anything, let’s get our house into order,” Sen. Corker said. “I thought the stimulus package was ridiculous. If you feel there are short-term issues that need to be dealt with in this country, at least you’d get the long-term set, so when this little dip is over, people can see there are blue skies down the road.”

The Congressional Budget Office released a report that, based on the “wish list” that President Obama sent to Congress that stated the entire healthcare reform process would cost more than $100 billion a year for the next ten years to pay for all the changes.  At a time when the national debt and deficit are at numbers never before seen in U.S. history, a lot of people from all political backgrounds are understandably worried about how the government plans to pay for everything.

Even more basic is whether or not the federal government should be getting into the health care business, although, of course, it already is through Medicare and the VA.  Proponents cite the U.S. Constitution, pointing out that one of the key responsibilities of our government is to “promote the common welfare” of the people.  But many feel that the federal government has far exceeded its own authority in trying to dictate healthcare decisions.  Others wonder how far the current proposals will go. A lot of these people are expressing their fears and frustrations quite vocally in the recent town hall meetings.

At the same time, what could (and should) have been a serious give-and-take on the issues of cost and personal responsibility, has in some cases turned into a political free-for-all, led by unconscionably deliberate untruths being spread by political figures such as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin with her “death panel” claims.  Add in political commentators comparing the healthcare reform logo to Nazi symbols and using scare tactics to cloud the issue, the “debate” in some cases has turned into little more than a political attack on the current administration—instead of a real effort to find a solution to a huge problem.