Today I like to comment on the article Looks Like They're Getting Ready to Dump Adult Coverage For Pre-Existing Conditions, which was published on Sunday (Jan 24) by Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars. The topic of this post is the health care reform by Barack Obama. I think this is a very important and interesting subject of the current politics in America. If you want to inform yourself about all promises made by Obama and about his plans of the health care reform you can have a look here; I think this is a great summary, made by The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation , which is a non-profit, private operating foundation and focuses their research on the major health care issues

In my article I will first talk about this video published on youtube (and used by Crooks and Liars), and after this about the issue, that the government of America seems to suggest that much of President Obama's promise to ban pre-existing conditions is now being jettisoned.

I think this is a great video, which shows one of the main problems of the American health care system; people do not know anything about it! All of them seem to know that there is something like a health care system, but a lot of them do not understand or do not want to know what this is all about. Most of the people find the system very complicated and confusing – I think they try to get information, but no one is able to review the whole reform. So the main problem is the complexity of the health care system. This is a nice quote (source) which shows the whole mess of the reform:

“What's really in Obama's health care reform bill? Almost no one knows, and here's why: It's 1,017 pages long and written in an alien form of bureaucratic English that can barely be decoded by earthlings.”

The people in the video seem to be uninterested in politics and uninformed about the system of health care – but I think that it is nearly impossible to get a complete overview.

I also think it is kind of frightening, that insurers want to know EVERYTHING about you. They dig through your personal medical history to decide if you qualify yourself for health care. Most of the people think that they are healthy and that they would have no problem to get health insurance – but again they do not know enough about this system. People who seem to be completely healthy do not get an insurance because of very ridiculous reasons. I think this is crazy, in my opinion it should be a human right to get the best help possible if you are seriously sick…

Another problem is, that insurers can make up their own criteria to decide whether you get an insurance or not. Policemen ore firefighter may not get insurance because of their dangerous job - but this people risk their life to save other people. On the one hand society really needs such persons, on the other hand they do not care about them. I think that is really weird, too.

Obamas promise was to change the health care system, he wanted to help all the people, no matter if they are rich or poor. He also wanted to make sure that no one can be banned from insurance because of pre-existing conditions. Nowadays it seems, that he will not be able to make this plans true; here is the quote from Crooks and Liars:

“Plouffe wrote in the op ed, which was certainly cleared with the White House, if not written by them:

Parents won't have to worry their children will be denied

coverage just because they have a preexisting condition.

Their children? The original promise - even the bad Senate bill - protects everyone, of any age, from being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Now it's just children?“

If this is the truth Obama will lose a lot of his credibility. In my opinion he has to keep his promise, otherwise a lot of voters will turn away from him. With Obama they voted for the change, but if there is no change they can not belief in him anymore.

M.P.