Southlanders Weigh In On Re-ignited Debate Over 'Obamacare'
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — President Barack Obama's health care reform was front and center for hearings Monday to determine the fate of a law aimed at extending health insurance to more than 30 million Americans.
Many Southern California residents support the law and are looking to educate other Americans by giving them the facts.
Children's Hospital dietician and mother Rebecca Charlton said that she is concerned for her two young children and hopes the law remains so that they can have healthcare coverage after their teenage years.
Her 9-month-old son was recently diagnosed with asthma and she fears he will not get the proper care he needs if the law is revoked by the Supreme Court.
"At some point in time when he was 21, 23, depending on what the insurance plan was, he would've phased off that insurance and with a pre-existing condition. There was a cost benefit analysis done in a corporation somewhere determining whether or not that condition meant that they were insurable and so for thousands maybe millions of children, there was a red check mark on their name for something they had nothing to do with that said no," Charlton said.
She said her family has already benefited from the health care reform law, even though most of its provisions have not kicked in yet, and she believes millions of other Americans will not have to worry about their children having health care coverage when they grow up.
Beverly Hills dentist Joel Strom acknowledged that there are some things about the health care reform law to like, but he said he believes when the full impact of the law is felt in two or three years, a lot of patients and doctors will find out they are not better off than they are now.
"Physicians are going to have a whole slew of hoops to jump through to treat their patients the way that they feel best. When the provisions of the law take effect in a couple years when the full feeling can come out to the patient they will find that cardiologists for example will be limited in how many EKGs they will be able to perform or face fines. These are things that are in the bill that most patients don't know about," he said.
Strom has founded an organization called DocSquads.
The goal, he said, is to take the emotion and strident rhetoric out of the health care reform discussion and replace it with the facts.
He believes when patients understand how the law may impede good medicine practices, they may not like what they are getting.
The Supreme Court will continue the hearings on the health care reform law on Tuesday and Wednesday.
