Which health plan are you voting for?

With the US election less than two weeks away you may already have made up your mind about the candidate that will get your vote. (And you are voting, right?)

If you have a chronic illness like diabetes, one important consideration is how the future president might impact health care in the US. If you're like me, you've probably got a lot of questions about this. To help you make up your mind about this, here's some assigned reading!

Today's Wall Street Journal talks about A Blizzard of Numbers and how these are obscuring the details of the health plans for the two major candidates. Their main point is that some experts have produced the numbers for each health plan option, but these are estimates, not exact figures. The WSJ article also refers to an article from yesterday's New York Times On Health Plans, the Numbers Fly that calls these figures "the roughest of estimates".

Jenny's post at Diabetes Update, Joe the Plumber and McCain's Health Plan points out

The US Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, two highly conservative business lobbying groups, have both stated that they believe McCain's health plan to be deeply flawed (my emphasis and likely to increase the number of the uninsured, not lower it.

Finally the National Federation of Independent Business has a nice side-by-side comparison of where McCain and Obama stand on health care.

Remember, your vote does count. If you need more information about voting where you live use this handy site provided by Google.

Update: The New England Journal of medicine published a somewhat related (short) article Three "Inconvenient" Truths about Healthcare. The summary is that our current approach to healthcare needs to be changed for the reasons covered in the article.

Update 2: The Wall Street Journal has an editorial page article on health care choices between the two candidates. According to this, Mr. Obama "would impose new nationwide rules on insurance companies to prohibit "cherry picking," where companies sometimes reject applicants on the basis of pre-existing conditions" while Mr. McCain "believes such regulations are one reason health coverage is so expensive".

My take is that many of us with chronic illnesses would be served extremely badly if we were excluded for coverage of our 'pre-existing' conditions.

Labels: healthcare, president, vote

posted by Bernard @ 7:45 AM