support for health care reform

Anyone who thinks our health care system doesn’t need an overhaul hasn’t looked at Washington state’s Basic Health Plan lately. Or visited a clinic like Country Doctor Community Clinic on Capitol Hill, where I was yesterday afternoon.

And anyone on the waiting list for the Basic Health Plan – now bigger than the number actually enrolled – must not have been among those polled to make Washington the seventh happiest state in the country, according to a Gallup Poll. But that’s another story.

About 80,000 people are now waiting to get on Basic Health, the state’s subsidized plan for the working poor. About 65,000 people are currently enrolled in the plan, paying an average of $34 a month, with the state paying the remaining 85 percent of the premiums. Beginning in January, members will pay an average of $60 a month, or 25 percent of the total premium.

Already, budget cuts have forced tens of thousands of people off Basic Health. And because it receives no federal dollars, the program faces even deeper cuts with the $2.6 billion budget gap the state now faces. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell has inserted an amendment in the Senate health care reform bill that would rescue the plan, but even if that bill passes, the money wouldn’t flow until 2014, Kyung M.

An Internet poll shows that nearly 8 in 10 Americans support a federal health insurance plan for those who can't afford or can't get private insurance, and 86 percent say insurance should be available to everyone regardless of health history.

Wow. You wouldn't know that from the folks shouting and yelling at town hall meetings, or holding up signs with pictures of Obama with Hitler mustaches, or from those trading freely in loaded Nazi terminology when criticizing attempts to reform the ailing health care system in this country. That would be the health care system that ties health care so closely to employment, and that denies health care coverage to the sick or those with pre-existing conditions, that is responsible for a huge proportion of medical bankruptcies , that is is expensive that even many of those who are working can't afford it. That one.

The pollster says the term "public option" has been "swift boated," so large is the misunderstanding that has grown up around what it means, Allison Sherry reports in the  Denver Post. In fact, only 37 percent of respondents define it correctly. The poll was released at an AARP Forum in Denver in conjunction with Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report.

One-fourth of those polled believe the "public option" is a national health care system, similar to the one in Great Britain.

"These two words have become radioactive, they have been swift-boated," said William Mann, senior vice president of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, the firm that conducted the poll.