Commentary: Lee spreading 'fear, uncertainty and doubt'

Submitted by Judith Hunter, Geneseo

People in business have a term for what they need to do if they want to stop some sort of change. They call it spreading “FUD”: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Congressman Chris Lee’s statements on health care, both to The Livingston County News and in mailings we’ve all received, demonstrate that Lee’s former corporate career has trained him well. We’ve been awash in FUD, almost none of which stands up to scrutiny.

Just this past weekend, The Buffalo News used Congressman Lee’s public pronouncements on health care as Exhibit A in a piece about the distortions skewing our current debate over health care reform. For instance, he mailed a glossy piece to all of us in the 26th district, paid for by us taxpayers at the cost of $22,500, where he tried to frighten voters into opposing real change in how we pay for health care.

The problem is, he relies on a study by The Lewin Group for his distressing claim that many millions of people would lose their health care coverage. This is a long-debunked piece of misinformation perhaps best understood when we remember that the Lewin Group is owned UnitedHealth Group, a corporation with a huge stake in preserving the status quo.

In fact, Congressman Lee likes to pretend that highly profitable insurance companies aren’t even a part of the health care picture. As he said in these pages on July 30, “[T]he question has not been whether we need to reform the system — we absolutely do — but whether the government can do a better job of managing your health care than you and your doctor can.”

This ignores the reality that health insurance bureaucrats, who refer to any spending for care they have to provide as “losses,” control every aspect of how we are cared for by our doctors right now. Insurance companies are in the business of making money, not making sure we get appropriate care, and we all know or have experienced ourselves situations where our doctors cannot treat us as they would like because insurance won’t cover the costs.

The debate over reforming health care is really a debate about reforming health care insurance. Yet Congressman Lee’s preferred proposals make no mention of the insurance industry. What he proposes are tweaks around the edges of our current system that would leave health insurance companies unscathed, continuing to hold our health hostage to their nicely escalating profits. Health insurance bureaucrats, many of whom receive bonuses for figuring out ways not to pay for needed treatment, are hardly who we want in charge of our care. Yet that is the current situation, and one that would remain unchanged if Congressman Lee gets his way. Such a “solution” to the health care crisis would actually be a huge gift to the insurance industry.

Another problem with Mr. Lee’s current health care campaign is that he acts as if one proposal, H.R. 3200, is what we will end up with if his own prescriptions aren’t followed. But that bill is only one of several that various committees in the House and Senate have drafted.

There is a lot of negotiation and compromise that will have to happen before there is a single bill. Yet in the unlikely event that H.R. 3200 is the final version of health care reform, I hope Congressman Lee will consider some facts and figures before he casts his vote:

• Six percent of the people in this district, 39,000 people, lack health insurance. In 2008, the number of health-care related bankruptcies in this district was 1,000, and many of these people did have insurance, which didn’t cover the entire cost of their care.

• People who could not afford to pay for their care and were not covered under any plan cost health care providers in our district $57 million for uncompensated care last year, something we all end up paying for in higher medical costs.

• Every year almost 12,000 senior citizens in this district hit the “donut hole” in the Medicare prescription coverage and have to pay thousands of dollars for the medications they need. H.R. 3200 would immediately cut their costs in half and eventually get rid of the infamous “donut hole” all together.

• 12,400 small businesses in the 26th district would be eligible for tax credits that would cover almost half the cost of providing health insurance benefits for their employees.

• H.R. 3200 is fully-funded. Half of the costs would be met by savings in Medicaid and Medicare, and the other half would be met by an surtax on the very wealthiest taxpayers. 99.2 percent of the taxpayers in this district would not be affected.

(Download the PDF report prepare for Congressman Lee by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

The United States has reached a point where it must act. If we don’t, our health care costs will double in the next decade. It would be nice if our member of Congress were seriously grappling with the problems we have with the health insurance industry instead of spending his time and taxpayer money spreading FUD to protect the status quo.