The Health Care Law and My Good News

I just received a courtesy call from the denominational health care plan, called the Board of Pensions, to inform me that due to new requirements in place because of the recently passed Health Care bill my just graduated oldest daughter can remain a beneficiary on my plan through the age of 26. If she gets a job offering its own benefits she will need to switch to that plan. The cost to me for this benefit will not increase over what is currently being paid. I understood that this benefit would be required in 2011, but maybe the denomination is adapting early. I’ll find out.

This was good news to my wife and me. We looked into what continuation of her coverage would cost if she were not able to find a job with benefits. To keep her on our plan, we would have to pay for the continuation out of our pocket. We discovered that to keep her on our plan would cost us over $6000 a year. She certainly could not afford that on her own. Because of this new benefit, we will not have to pay that additional cost. It doesn’t matter if my daughter has a pre-existing condition or a recent condition, is being treated for chronic condition or enduring a regimen of chemotherapy, she would be covered. And next year, we expect to have another daughter graduate.

(check with your own insurance plan before assuming the same applies to you)

Though my daughter will no longer be allowed to gamble with her health by going uncovered and thereby exposing her, me and the country to the costs of any unforeseen health problem, she is not required to remain on my plan. We can exercise our capitalistic right to choose another plan to cover her if we were foolish enough to make that decision.

If we choose to accept this benefit, who pays the bill? Is this socialism at its worst and others will have to pay for my healthy, college graduate daughter avoid a $6000+ a year insurance bill?

I am going to look into the cost question further by calling the offices of the Board of Pensions when they re-open on Tuesday to better understand how increased costs are covered. My best guesses are that a part of the answer is cost averaging, another part other measures of the new Law to manage costs, and maybe even be a bump in costs by all members of the plan. I’ll research this and write a follow-up post.

Personally speaking, I’m grateful. Thank God my newly graduated daughter is healthy, but it helps my peace of mind to know she will be covered and helps my wallet that I won’t pay those extraordinary bills for continuation of coverage. If I discover that the economics of this outcome make sense, this is one part of the Health Care bill that makes great sense.

I’m a fiscal conservative so I appreciate scrutiny given to the Health Care plan as to costs and feasibility. I think that the recently passed Health Care bill is far from being what it should be. But what I didn’t agree with then and don’t agree with now is any scrutiny that is devoted to defeating the plan for reasons deemed more important than finding the most effective way to create an affordable and compassionate way to provide health coverage. Leave aside the extreme examples (drug abusers) because that is diversion debate. I am talking about the majority of people trying to get by in this world who might be unemployed or who work for wages that can’t afford such high insurance bills.

I hope a future focus will be on improving the Health Care plan, with Democrats and Republicans talking and listening to each other, and putting the fiscal and physical health of the public ahead of enhanced profitability of insurance companies and their stockholders and CEOs. Obscene profits for a service industry don’t make sense when they come at the cost of closing out those who should be covered.

I say all this not as an advocate for either political party, but as a Christian minister who has studied the biblical prophetic demand that the most vulnerable not be sacrificed for the sake of the interests of the powerful as well as the church’s best tradition of promoting dignity of life of which individual freedom is only one important component. I also say this as a citizen who will now benefit from one very sensible part of a new plan that I also wish for others to enjoy.

The Collateral Damage of Words

As my “Rules for Reading and Responding” might indicate, I have a problem with the way many things are debated in our country. I don’t want to get in the middle of the fray of the current debate over whether or not the language used by some politicians during the Health Care debate was too inflammatory and intemperate, except to seize on an unfortunate comment made by a blogger. Tom Perriello represents a neighboring district in the House of Representatives. A propane line was cut at his brother’s house, probably because a blogger mistakenly advertised the address as Rep. Perriello’s, and urged those who were upset at his Health Care vote to “drop by.”

I won’t give the blogger’s name because he later apologized both for this blog and for his next one which was even worse. After hearing about the cut propane line, he responded by posting: “Do you mean I posted his brother's address on my Facebook? Oh well, collateral damage."

Again, the blogger has apologized and others are doing a good job of taking him to task for posting the way he did. The phrase I want to focus upon is “collateral damage.”

Words do matter, and “collateral damage” does result when people with influence resort to name calling, caricaturing, ad homonym attacks (attacking the person over the position) to develop an Us vs Then/ Good vs Evil/ world in which there must be victory without compromise. We see it happen among those who govern and among commentators who earn their living talking about those who govern (though sometimes I’m confused as to who is commenting and who is governing). Gossip and sarcasm is all that much of this talk really is, and yet the rhetoric is condoned when used in the service of power. It is ends-justifies-the-means rhetoric that violates all the classic rules of civil discourse.

The collateral damage is that when church or political leaders become hostile in speech that is unfair and even untruthful, while they may energize the most zealous of their followers, they leave many disillusioned by the cynical nature of the whole enterprise. This can be particularly true of young people who realize they have been hurt, or who realize they have been led to hurt others, by the arguments of those they end up seeing being the voices of interests that…, well…, are not serving their best interest.

My next blog will be about how I think that violent rhetoric has become worse since 9/11. Still, the use of words to incite is not new. In fact, the demonization of other leaders and nations, and the twisting and fabrication of facts in order to incite the masses, has been a common tactic to lead nations into wars so as to advance the agendas of certain powers. This led the general Carl von Clausewitz to astutely define war as “the continuation of politics by different means.”

Consider this: When debate becomes violent as political powers seek to win at all costs, politics then becomes war by a different means.