President Will Tell Americans They Are Over-Insured

Over the weekend I saw this post over at Talking Points Memo which tells us that in the State Of The Union (SOTU) speech on Tuesday the president will say Americans are over-insured:

So the president thinks the problem is that people have too much health insurance. People are over-insured.

I don't think that's how most Americans see the problem, do you? I'm confident that they don't. Really confident.

But let's let them decide.

The LA Times has more, Health Plan to Revive Debate:

"We may be looking at the start of a fundamental shift in what we mean by health insurance, from a system where we share risks to one where it's up to individuals to make their own deals and bear their own risks," said Drew E. Altman, president of the nonpartisan California-based Kaiser Family Foundation.

"The danger," Altman said, "is that this new arrangement could work out very well for some people, especially the young, the healthy and the affluent, but be very bad for the health system as a whole."

That's exactly backwards of how insurance is supposed to work! Let's put together a system of health care insurance that makes it worse for the elderly, sick and poor!? Does that seem wrong to anyone other than me? With the recent debacle of the president's attempt to "fix" Social Security and the corrupt Medicare Part D drug plan the Republicans rammed through Congress, I can't believe any American would allow them to make changes like this:

However, the problems that Bush would be likely to face in making the case for substantial healthcare change run far deeper than what kind of tax deductions people would claim.

Most conservatives -— including those in the administration -— believe that the root cause of most problems with the nation's healthcare system is that most Americans are over-insured.

They argue that insurance keeps people from feeling the sting of prices and therefore from being wise consumers. Hence, conservatives' interest in making individuals take more risk and bear more responsibility for healthcare, retirement savings and other social safety nets.

But a wide array of polls reveal that, if anything, people feel underinsured, and have little interest in adding to the financial risks they face.

Feeling the sting of prices. Wow! I think it's time they felt the sting of a voter backlash!