Local politicians, business leaders react to health care reform

Defenders and disgusted alike summon a mutual point: transparency.
    
The health care bill signed by President Barack Obama on March 23 activated perhaps the most far-reaching societal reform in the United States since Social Security in 1935. The contentious compromises made to actualize the law seem to have wrapped up only a chapter of the quarreling that surrounds it.
    
“Transparent information needs to be provided to customers,” said one local corporation leader who was for the bill. Another person, who runs his own business in East Meadow, fumed that the officials who did not “actually explain to the taxpayer how this was going to be funded in the future should be voted out of office.”
    
The status quo was expensive and simply wasn’t working, said Arthur Gianelli, chief executive officer of NuHealth, which operates the Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow. In a recent interview Gianelli praised the bill’s inclusion (about 30 million uninsured Americans are expected to be covered) and its regulation of insurance companies, which will no longer be able to remove people from policies due to a pre-existing conditions.
    
Preliminary figures by the Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill will cost the government $938 billion over 10 years, but that it would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over the same time period.
   
For Gianelli, transparency means establishing a kinship with patients. The NUMC receives state support to care for patients who are uninsured or on Medicaid. A portion of that money will be cut to pay for the health care bill. And those previously uninsured patients will go to state-run health insurance exchanges when they become available in 2014.