President Obama arrives and departs: Getting past the garbage and the exhaust

Perhaps this photo of the garbage being removed from Air Force One after President Obama arrived Monday morning at Willow Grove Naval Air Station can inspire us to a meaningful cleansing of our country’s health care nonsense.

First, the setting. There were a number of things missing at the president’s arrival: There was no red carpet. No band. No military fanfare. (Well, one of the security guards trained a rifle toward the media platform, but not for more than about 15 minutes.) No P.A. announcement that Air Force One would soon be arriving at gate, uh … building number 780.

The setting — continued: Our stage is currently dominated by an oligopoly of privatized health care insurance. We have quite an unsocialized, even uncivilized, concentration of the nation’s health care insurance market by large and uncompetitive private insurance giants. Hardly socialism! Not even decent capitalism.

This afternoon, after Obama spoke at Arcadia, I took part in a conference call with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She detailed the destruction of free market choice by today’s private health care manipulations. She described quite intentional and substantial hikes to health care insurance premiums that far exceed the hikes in actual medical costs. She described insurance goliaths’ “slicing and dicing” of market segments. She criticized premiums calculated to be high enough to push weak payers, vulnerable patients and small group players out of the market entirely, while still being able to capture plenty of revenues and profits from those who can pay the artificially bloated rates. She described the damage this oligopolistic control wrecks on the economy, the public, and on individual patients.

Sebelius calls for better transparency and defends the administration’s health care reforms.

That wouldn’t be a bad start.

In today’s world, a government-sponsored insurance option should certainly be no more of a “socialist” threat than the free market-driven public charter school movement. Aren’t we all supposed to be dedicated to competition?

There are a lot of additional problems with health care these days.

When we think about health care costs, think about the advertising assault we’re subjected to every day from insurers and big pharma. Those budgets may help camouflage some profit lines. Think about the entire industries that have grown up in the past decades for medical coding, claims, billing and pricing strategies. (Yes, job growth, BUT…) A far cry from the medical offices I remember from the 1950s, when the doctors knew the patients well and didn’t charge at all unless they could pay; when sliding scales were considered progressive and when the only insurance needed was catastrophic care. How much of today’s health care dollar translates into actual patient care?

When we think about problems with health care, think about the daily struggle with MRSA and individual responsibility. Read everyday horror stories of medical errors. Who needs science fiction? With budget-strapped health providers all-too-frequently stretching their personnel too thin to meet highest standards of care, we all know the mantra that today’s patients had better be their own advocates.

Easy, ideological slogans and quick cute rhetoric too often hide more complex thinking and difficult policy making.

As Air Force One turned its nose away from the media platform and blew breathtakingly incredible exhaust, fumes, sand and heat directly in our faces, it was logical to think of ourselves as the butt of a nasty cosmic fart.

It’s not just up to Congress and the president. Citizens must become better informed and, as the president reminded us: “Seize reform.”