ACCORDING TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TOO MUCH OF AMERICA?S GDP IS SPENT ON HEALTH CARE.
BUT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CREATED THE PROBLEM:
Decades ago the government passed ?pay or play? tax incentives that encouraged employers to provide employees with health insurance.
And America was hooked on health care the way junkies get hooked on smack. The dealer gave free samples until the client was hooked.
When I was young America was the world?s wealthiest nation. And employer provided health insurance paid 100% of medical costs. Because it was free it was abused. Mom took children to the emergency room for a rash and to the doctor for a small cut. Demand was artificially high.
Cost shifting provided for the uninsured. Patients with good insurance policies and wealthy patients with no insurance policies received inflated invoices to cover the costs of those who could not pay. Health care providers and hospitals robbed from the rich to provide health care for the poor.
It is instructive that during the time when America enjoyed great wealth the Federal Government expressed no concern for the plight of the uninsured!
But over time manufacturing jobs moved overseas and were replaced with lower paying service economy jobs. Consequently, employers offered health insurance with less coverage and higher deductibles and co-pays.
Were factory jobs lost because America could not compete with manufacturers in countries where government paid for health care? Regardless, American leaders would not raise tariffs to level the playing field and signed GATT and NAFTA into law!
And America?s leaders permitted millions of ?illegal? aliens to cross the border to do work American?s would not do. Our schools educated their children, our State governments gave them drivers licenses, our banks granted them mortgages and our hospitals provided them health care.
BOGUS SOLUTION
Now that America is the worlds biggest debtor nation the Federal Government has decided the plight of the uninsured is unconscionable and universal coverage is a moral imperative.
But this is not about the 46 million uninsured. It is about assuring health insurance companies? market share and health care professionals expected incomes and lifestyles.
The health system in America has been based on a larger and more affluent generation of young policy holders offsetting the health cost of middle aged and seniors. This formula is being upset by the WWII baby boomers generation approaching retirement and the global recession.
President Obama wants every American citizen to be required to buy a health insurance policy. He compares it to the requirement that motorists purchase auto insurance. But while driving is a privilege, life and the pursuit of happiness is a right!
Where in the Constitution or Bill of Rights is the Federal Governments authority to require the purchase of a health insurance policy as a condition of having been born?
Where is freedom when government has the power to tell you how to spend after tax dollars? What distinguishes disposable income from taxes?
As for the proposal that the IRS be charged with fining citizens who do not purchase a health insurance policy, since the federal government just prints more paper money to pay debt why is taxation or the IRS even necessary. Just shutdown the IRS and transfer its budget to indigent care!
FREE MARKET IS THE SOLUTION
Is providing health care an enumerated power or responsibility of the Federal Government?
The Federal Government lacks any authority to preach fiscal responsibility. It has exhibited none in my lifetime and has reduced the wealthiest nation on the planet to world?s biggest debtor nation.
But Ma and Pa citizen have had to balance a checkbook their entire lives. The solution is to return control of health care spending to them.
Pass a law making it illegal for an employer to offer health insurance as an employee benefit. End wage stagnation and give employees raises instead.
Doing away with group health insurance and forcing insurance providers to compete for individual business will permit cost conscious Ma and Pa to shop for the best deal, like they do auto insurance. Then the free market will bring costs under control!
If I had my druthers I would support a single payer health system.
But if I did want to argue against single payer, I would not focus on imagined horror stories from Canada and England, where the majority of people are quite happy with single payer systems.
Instead I would focus on innovators like Jay Parkinson and Hello Health, whom I noted at ZDNet Healthcare in March.
His idea is deceptively simple. Hello Health gives you all the online connection to your doctor you could ever want.
But you pay for that, about $35 per month. And if you actually need to see the doctor, you pay more, $100 for a basic visit, twice that if you need serious time. And no, it’s not covered by insurance. It’s a version of “concierge medicine,” where the doctor is paid to keep you well, not just treat you when you’re sick.
As Parkinson told the Boston Globe recently, “No more frantic Googling, no more whole days away from work, no more long waits, and no more unnecessary Emergency Room visits, or scary receptionists.’’
Maybe. Personally I have more faith in Google to make available the health information I need than in the ability of Parkinson or his fellow physicians to aggregate it.
But his concepts are true innovation, not just technologically but in terms of the business model. And they are in line with what reformers call the “medical home” concept, in which technology is used to improve the productivity of both doctors and nurses and patients are in charge of their own care.
Encouraging this innovation is what America is all about, I would argue. Let’s see what our entrepreneurs can do with a streamlined payment system before we toss that opportunity away and hand the money to government.
That’s what I would say if I were against single payer, anyway. Pity health reform opponents have so little imagination, or faith in entrepreneurship.
