Health Insurance Reform

Everyone keeps calling it health care reform, but it's not. No one is changing the ways in which health care is delivered, or how doctors and nurses are trained, in this country.

What's changing is how health care will be paid for. (The New York Times summarizes the changes in an editorial today.) The insurance companies have been making big bucks from the existing system, and they don't want that to change, because it limits their ability to profit from other people's misfortune and misery.

And that's what the Republicans who are vowing to repeal reform are fighting for: to allow insurance companies to keep denying coverage to people as soon as they get sick, to find ways to limit payments to sick people, to make their primary priority making money, not making sure Americans have access to doctors when they need it.

Let's take back this discourse, and be clear: it's not health care reform, it's health insurance reform.