Only the facts, ma'am!

As a medical layperson very interested in the broad subject of health-care reform, I’ve expended a lot of effort trying to find the facts underlying the many proposals in the various Congressional bills. I have no doubt worked much, much harder at it than most members of the public (I’ve even read/scanned HR 3200 twice!). The subject is amazingly opaque, as are most of the specific elements of the bills. It’s unreasonably hard to get real data—and I am still working on that. At the same time, it is obvious and seriously annoying that President Obama and the Congressional leadership keep repeating “facts” that are untrue, at least in the context in which they are offered. (A couple of examples: “47 million uninsured Americans” suddenly became “30 million uninsured Americans” in the President’s recent speech to the Congress; and both the White House and Senator Baucus scrambled to add features to screen out illegal aliens to the President’s “plan” and to the Senator’s work-in-progress after Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst.)

The public has been told that over 10 years Federal expenditures will have to be increased by $1.5 trillion, or $1.1 trillion, or $900 billion, or $780 billion, but we have never been shown a spreadsheet or even a simple list of where those unthinkable amounts of money will go. Likewise, all of the bills propose to redirect hundreds of billions in Medicare expenditures away from Medicare, and no one tells the public which elements of Medicare will be cut—we have only vague promises that no one will experience cutbacks (and that is obviously untrue, since the very popular Medicare Advantage plans are targeted for extreme cutbacks). The President and various Congressional leaders seem unable to fathom why a majority of Americans trust neither the health-care reform process nor their public statements on the subject. It is impossible to earn the public’s trust by concealing facts and plans, withholding explanations, relying on emotional appeals, and trying to paper over the whole story with misleading assertions of “facts.”

This is not some super-secret National Security Agency budget! It’s a set of major changes to American life that will profoundly affect nearly every one of us, economically and existentially. Don’t you feel, as I do, that the public needs and deserves factual explanations and true accounts of the problems, the costs, and the changes envisioned? Will you step out and promote an honest and thorough disclosure of the factual health-care problems warranting reform and the costs and effects of each of the major reform proposals?