Health-care reform and the ’09 elections
You tell a tea-partier that a key element of health-care reform is reducing overhead costs, and they counter that the overhead costs of private insurers include spending money to investigate allegations of fraud and abuse of the system and collecting on delinquent accounts and that sort of thing.
I mention this to Greg Marrow, the Democratic Party nominee for the 25th District House of Delegates seat and a practicing optometrist, and what I hear back surprises me. He’s never had a private insurer contact him regarding fraud or a delinquent account, but he does hear somewhat regularly from the Medicare and Medicaid systems that supposedly don’t run up the same level of costs in these areas that the private guys do.
“Look at the fact that of the 25 most-developed nations, we’re the only one that does not have some sort of national health care. The only one. And as Americans, and the great entrepreneurs that we are, as the great free-market capitalists that we are, there’s no reason we can’t take that idea and make it our own,” said Marrow, who is hearing plenty from voters on the campaign trail in the 25th, which includes Waynesboro, Crozet and portions of eastern Augusta County and Rockingham County.
The one thing that Marrow senses from his talks on the front porches of local voters is that most people want health reform, but at the same time don’t know exactly what it is that they want from health reform.
“We have a wonderful health-care system. I think what most people are concerned about is health insurance. It’s not health-care reform. It’s health-care insurance reform,” Marrow said.
Progressive voters had largely been staying out of the fray on the reform issue until the past couple of weeks, which have been marked by a bit of massive resistance at play from the tea-party set, which has turned the national discussion on the merits of specific reform proposals into an occasion for protesting the Democratic Party victories in the 2008 federal elections thinly disguised.
“These people, when I was canvassing their homes three months ago weren’t quite as interested. But now they are,” said Marrow, who points out that the specifics of any reform emanating out of Washington will have to be spelled out on the front lines by state legislatures across the country in our federal system.
“If you give them a sense of, really we’re on the cusp of making some truly social changes, changes that are going to benefit us all, not just a few, not any one socioeconomic group, not a select group, not an elite group, but that will actually benefit us all, then you see the Democrats and the independents and the leaning Republicans responding,” Marrow said.
- Story by Chris Graham
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