FLAGLER HOSPITAL PRESIDENT JOSEPH GORDY
There's a wailin' and gnashin' of teeth by corporativists as health care reforms are center stage at last -- 64 years after President Truman first proposed national health care. Apparently someone wrote something insipid and signed the name of the local hospital administrator (see below):
Publication Date: 08/24/09
Editor: President Barack Obama routinely assures us that if you like your current health plan you can keep it under his reform program. He also repeatedly tells us that if we like our doctors we can keep them, too.
The House bill, if passed in its present form, dictates the benefit package an insurance plan must offer to be qualified as acceptable insurance. In addition, the legislation dictates the percentage of the premium cost that an employer must cover for their employees. All existing plans are grandfathered for five years, but no new enrollment may take place if these conditions are not met.
In addition, the legislation cuts Medicare payments to physicians and establishes rates of payment for the public plan. No doctor is obligated to accept patients in these plans if they don't find these payment rates tolerable.
So, under Obama's plan, if you have a health insurance policy that you like and it does not meet the government's requirements, you can't keep it after five years. If, you are in one of the plans with pay rates set by the government and your physicians will not accept them, you won't be able to keep your doctors either.
Regretfully, I can only logically conclude one of three things. The president has no idea what is in his own proposal; the president doesn't understand his own proposal; or the president thinks you would not like the truth.
Joseph Gordy
St. Augustine
Editor's note: Joe Gordy is president of Flagler Hospital.
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