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Obama’s Health Care Reform Turns Into Health Insurance Reform?

Obama and his ministerial team have made a small but important change in the ways they are expressing their heath reform policy. Obama, initially when speaking about this new system, talked mainly about the massive shift or transformation in the country’s health care system which would cut the ever increasing costs spent in medication. But the president has now altered his language and now speaks exclusively about the health insurance reforms.

Speaking about this, even Obama’s visit to the town hall meeting in New Hampshire was referred by White House as the health insurance reform hall. But this was not the case when all these proceedings started back in March and the Obama’s campaign to renovate the country’s healthcare system was named the White House Health Reform Forum.

This change in plan had let to the worries of many healthcare experts as this new plan clears signals that Obama will only settle expanding the health insurance coverage to uninsured people rather than bringing the escalating health care costs under proper control as mentioned in the original policy. The economists are also not very happy with this decision as they feel just covering the insurance cost without any methods to cut additional healthcare costs will only create further financial mess. Speaking about this David Knott, Head of the Booz & Co’s global health practice said that the team has lost the true plot on the health care reform. He also feels that the initial debate started out as a full fledged solution to the country’s health care system but now has nailed down to only meet the affordability problem.

It is clearly obvious that Obama’s current language and the one he used while the start of the debate is completely different. Speaking to the crowd in New Hampshire the president said, health insurance reforms are the key to build new foundation to the country health care system. He highlighted the fact that almost 46 million Americans are without health insurance today. He also stressed that these health insurance reforms are not only for the uninsured as most of these policies favor the insurance companies. These remarks are contradictory to Obama’s speech which he laid on March 5 at health reform summit. There the President said that cutting the overall health care costs would be the first step forward in rebuilding the country’s economy. The President then said that these investments in health care reform will definitely not add up to the budget and these investments would prove really profitable.

What has lead to this change? Right from the start it was obvious that the Congress has not got any plans to change the fee-for- the service method that is currently in practice for paying the hospitals and doctors. This method rewards the healthcare providers not for the quality but quantity. So if you assume that these doctors and hospitals account for almost two thirds of the nation’s health related spending, not touching this part means that the legislators have not many option to cut costs. Added to this, the legislators have even proposed paying doctors a lump sum of $245 billion in the Medicare reimbursements for the next 10 years to ensure their support for the health reform.

The government’s reluctance in this can be directly owed to the fact that hospitals are largest employers in most districts and also give them the political clout. Even the public rates these doctors at top among the other professions. In this context, insurers are the one who are quite unpopular with the public and thus are much easier target.

This change in plan has lead to arguments and people are started making it these days for passing the universal coverage. Many feel that this governments approach is concentrating on universal coverage and worrying about the overall cost cutting changes later. Massachusetts also did the same in the year 2006 when it proposed a universal coverage law. But now the city is facing escalating costs and is now planning to overhaul the fee structures of doctors. It is sure that this strategy won’t be possible in a nationwide basis where the current health care spending is projected to consume almost 20% of the GDP by 2017.

Hearing to the president’s change in tone, Robert Laszewki, Health insurance consultant wrote in his blog named health care policy & market review that he had been insisting for months that heath care reform bills passed by the government have not been true healthcare reform bills but are expansions to the health insurance reforms. He also feels that the country needs lot more than mere health insurance reforms and they truly needed health care reforms.