Health Care Reform: You'll Learn to Love It

I know you conservatives are upset about the health care reform bill clearing the House, but let me spin it another way for you.

Gone are the days when you could pay the doctor with chickens and rutabagas, and those days are not coming back unless we're in a nuclear winter (in which case our current problems will seem small).

Who among you can say you haven't looked at Medicare recipients and wished you too were 65 years old? Probably the first time in history that an adult longed for old age. Likewise, Medicaid for the poor may have looked like a pretty good deal if you earned too much to qualify but not enough to buy insurance on your own.

A generation ago, Medicare and Medicaid were sufficient because most people had group health insurance, often paid in full by an employer. At my husband's job in 1977, he didn't have to kick in a penny, and I was added to the policy for a mere $22 a month. Even if you factor in inflation, $22 is a far cry from what I pay today.

You've heard of mission creep and bracket creep? People hardly noticed at first, but for the last three decades we've had health care creep. Slowly, year by year, medical costs and insurance premiums kept rising until they finally met a wall of resistance.

Companies began chipping away at employee benefits, but that's not all. An ugly side effect of unaffordable health care was that some employers took advantage of sick workers by increasing workloads and cutting wages. Why? Because they could.

Do we really want a country where the middle class is so burdened with health care costs they wish they were old or poor? Without reform, that's where we were headed.

It would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the uninsured got sick, they would surely soon become poor.

And if the uninsured skipped checkups, tests and preventive measures to avoid paper trails of pre-existing conditions, patients might end up feeling much older than 65 once diseases got so advanced they could no longer be ignored. The delay would cost more money in the long run. Not to mention costing some patients their lives.

So look at it this way: Our current health care system discriminated against the middle class and the middle aged. Reform addresses that discrimination. About time.