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August 17: Kaptur Continues Health Care Blitz, Chatting with Constituents on Channel 11

August 18, 2009

“I am supporting an improved health system that puts you in charge rather than someone else making a decision about your health care and gives you more options—more options for doctors and more options for insurance,” Kaptur responded to one of the participants in the web chat.

“The state systems haven’t worked very well, so we’re trying to provide more options with better managed care where you have a carrier with doctors that that you pick that help you manage your family’s health needs more wisely, rather than just than just sort of a set of transactions that occur between yourself, let’s say, a procedure and the insurance company.

“The goal is to try to get you into a plan that you pick, where you feel you have very carefully monitored care, that you participate in, so nobody’s left out, nobody’s rejected and you have choices. That sounds like a much better system than we have today for so many people. If you like what you have, you keep it…

“The private market is becoming more expensive and more restrictive. And we have to somehow as a country decide, if we’re spending so much money on health insurance and health care, why aren’t we getting better outcomes? Maybe we need to organize the way that choices are made available, maybe we need to figure out how to negotiate these prescription drug prices to help people have better outcomes.

“The goal is to try provide a more streamlined and better system.”

Kaptur said one of her objectives is to strengthen provisions for home health care. As currently written, she said, the House bill “gives far too much to the nursing home industry and not enough emphasis to the home caregiver.”

She noted in response to other questions that the bill “does not cover anyone here (in the United States) illegally” and that the Hyde Amendment would continue to prohibit the use of federal funds for abortions except in the case of rape, incest or life of the mother.

“We simply have to do something,” she said. “More and more people are falling off their insurance.”