Opinions

The great debate is on, again, in the United States…government sponsored health care for all citizens.

Personally, I believe it is long overdue. In a nation as great and powerful as the United States, you would expect that it would guarantee it citizens basic needs such as health care. Actually, it does provide health care and has done so for many decades. It provides health care for most government workers, members of the Senate and House of Representatives and other elected/appointed government officials.  But the largest group of beneficiaries are active duty military and their families, disabled veterans and   military retirees and their families. This group alone is over 9 million persons.

The military health care system is called TRICARE. I, myself, am eligible for this health care program.

Here is an article presenting the perplexing problem of a large group of American politicians, mostly from southern states, that are strongly against a government health care program but have the highest receivers of care from the TRICARE program. It makes an interesting argument:

We Already Have a Popular Single-Payer Health Care System — It’s for Active Military and Veterans

By Chris Kromm, Facing South. Posted July 2, 2009.

Oddly the states with the most people enrolled are down South — where political leadership has been most opposed to single-payer.

In this year’s health reform debate, congressional Democrats quickly took proposals for a single-payer system off the table, claiming it was “unrealistic.”

But more than 9 million people in the U.S. have already signed on to a single-payer system that has proved both workable and popular: TRICARE, the Department of Defense’s program for active-duty military and retirees.

Even more interesting: According to a Facing South analysis, nearly half of TRICARE beneficiaries live in the South — states where congressional leadership has been most vocal in opposing public involvement in health care.

Last week, a top-rated diary at DailyKos by a person claiming to be “an active duty obstetrician/ gynecologist in a major medical facility on the East Coast” noted that:

“9.2 million active-duty and retired uniformed service member and their families receive their health care from the federal government. My family and I receive free health care from the federal government … I am struck however that nobody has brought up the simple fact that the government already provides free health care in a single-payer model to over 9 million of its population.”

I decided to look into where TRICARE beneficiaries were located. According to my analysis of TRICARE data, 47 percent of the 9.2 million using TRICARE live in 13 Southern states:

Overall, 6 of the 10 states with highest number of TRICARE beneficiaries are in the South. This makes sense given the high number of military bases in Southern states, as well as the concentration of active-duty and retired military in states like Virginia.

The high Southern enrollment in government-run TRICARE, where the military pays private doctors in a single-payer system, seems at odds with the vocal opposition of Southern lawmakers to anything smacking of public involvement in health care.

South Carolina:

The Palmetto State has the eighth-highest TRICARE enrollment in the nation, nearly a quarter-million people. But South Carolina’s overall population ranks only 24th nationally — meaning that the share of South Carolinians using TRICARE’s single-payer government option is one of the largest in the country.

Contrast TRICARE’s popularity in South Carolina with these words last week from Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who has led the Republican Party’s attempts to torpedo health proposals that involve the government:

“[Democrats] think we’re stupid,” said DeMint. “They think that you don’t know that government does not work well, that the same people who cleaned up after Hurricane Katrina are the ones who can really run our health care system with that personal touch that we all want … They’re talking about a government plan that can do things that no government plan has ever done.”

The 233,725 people who chose to use TRICARE in DeMint’s home state probably disagree.

I will be honest in  my opinion of the TRICARE system. It is a highly imperfect system that is fraught with corruption. Padding of medical bills, billing non-existent  medical care – you get the picture. To be fair to the system, it is no more corrupt than Medicare. Actually Medicare fraud is hundreds of times more than TRICARE fraud. TRICARE needs to be revamped, no better yet redesigned to be more friendly and more fair to our nation’s heroes. This was a medical care system that was promised to all career military men as a life-time benefit with no cost to the military retiree. Well, it isn’t free by any means and there has been a “cancer” on the program for years – the American Congress. They want to get rid of the program and, of course, they want to extend their free medical benefits for their entire lifetime.

I hope that President Obama will be able to fight the opposition and put in place a real medical care program that will truly extend and better the lives of all Americans. If the program is 80% of what the government officials have right now; it will be a true success.

Technorati Tags: Chris Kromm, Facing South, Free Health Care, Military Health Care, President Obama, TRICARE, United States Health Care, US Government Health CAre, US House of Representatives, US Senate