Looks like I need to dust off some spiderwebs around here…so here comes a post.
While noodling around on Facebook, a friend of mine mentioned how much she has to pay for health care and then wryly informed the Republican party at large that no, she doesn’t want healthcare reform. I can certainly understand her frustration. Given how much she pays for probably substandard insurance, I can relate to her pain, as I do the same. But it got me to put my grey matter to work a bit.
As someone who leans gently to the right fiscally — note: I say gently, not falling into it — I oppose government run, mandated, offered, suggested, or brainstormed health care. I want our federal government as far away as possible from our health care system. Aren’t these the same people who brought us the IRS? Who can’t make up their minds about who said we were going into the Middle East and why? The same folks who can steal sensitive documents out of the National Archives in their underwear, yet still manage to avoid a jail sentence?
I mean, seriously, are these the people you want to decide whether or not you get an organ donation and how many doctor’s visits you get per year? I don’t. And yet…
I agree with healthcare reform, the idea. Not the political debate, the vote-for-me-because-I’ll-change-healthcare crap we see on television and hear on the radio. But I do agree that we as citizens need to start being more active in our fight against healthcare’s rising costs.
But we do need to keep a few things in mind while we’re galavanting off to save our children’s health care costs.
1. We pay as much and often more for a car that we are willing to pay for healthcare. Why is it we’ll plunk down a load of cash on a car, often a leased car which we’ll never even own, yet we whine because we have to pay for healthcare? Have you noticed how the price of cars has gone up in the last 20 years? Yet we happily trade in our next-to-new car to get the newer version. But we have to have health insurance, you say. Well, many of us have to have cars. And we all get choices. We can buy older cars and pay less money, with the understanding that it may cost us money as it gets older and older. Or we can buy a new car and spend more money, and feel somewhat secure that it won’t cost us near as much. Same way with health insurance. Pay now or pay later, folks. There aren’t too many options otherwise. And isn’t that the way life works?
2. We have to acknowledge the increase in our medical options and the cost of those. Technology costs big-time. The more medical advances we have, the more expensive they get. We can sit back and say we are paying too much, but then we constantly complain that we should have cured the common cold (that is my whine as well). All the miracle cures we have discovered and the amazing surgeries they can now perform that we read about in the newspaper all require big bucks. We have to accept that the price of medical care is a lot more than what our parents paid.
3. You can’t ignore what the doctors have to charge to survive. They went to school for a LOT longer than most of us, and they deserve to make a good living from their hard work. They have to pay exorbitant costs for their business insurance, and crazy claims and morons out there who are sue-happy DO make it bad for all of us. People aren’t just saying that: it’s true. Go talk to your general practitioner. I guarantee he/she will have tales to tell about the crazy law suits they and their colleagues have to face every year. And they have to pay their employees; the increased requirements of paperwork take more manpower to complete.
4. We are all going to pay for it, if we are working. If you don’t like what you pay for healthcare now, you think it’s going to get cheaper because the government is paying for it? Please. Where does the government get the money? US. We’ll pay for it in the form of higher taxes. And it won’t just be on the rich, though remember, if we take away their incentive to be rich here, they’ll move. Why stay? Reality is, if the government can squeeze any of us for another dime, they will. They are power-hungry monsters down there, enjoying our cash like a bunch of shopaholics watching QVC. They will tax us all higher and higher, and then we don’t get choices about how much we pay and to whom. It will be the law, gang. And the only people getting free healthcare will be those living off the system…and how many of us want to make that a life goal? Hm?
I’m all for changing our healthcare system. There are corruptions that are unfair, and there are prices that are too high. But we have to be willing to look at it all under the umbrella of finding the RIGHT change. Not just change itself. And chances are, we do all want similar things. We just have to be willing to find a way to compromise to bring about a better system.
Posted by williek on October 4, 2010 at 1:28 am
Excellent analysis on the immediate cause and effect issues. There are some deeper issues however. Part of the increase in health costs is due to the prevalence of third-party insurance. Because people let their insurance pay the bills, they ignore how much the charges are. This has multiple consequences, 1) because of the overhead of insurance reporting, the doctor’s costs go up–way up. 2) Insurance companies fight a battle with the doctors and the purchasers over what gets paid for and how much gets paid. 3) effectively there is little competition for the insurance companies since every plan has to be sold at a state level 4) there is no competition among doctors because people don’t shop around for doctors when they have insurance. In fact, many plans limit which doctors they can use. 5) because of the insulation of the customer from the cost, mandated hospital policies add massively to hospital costs and are unnoted by the consumers. Case in point, all hospital rooms have to be private because of HIPPA requirements. Nice for the patients and families, but a massive increase in cost compared to wards and semi-private rooms.
Another area where costs have increased drastically is drugs, but the elephant in the room is the FDA. The requirements to get a new drug to market have become increasingly stringent, far beyond a realistic requirement for safety. This has two consequences, fewer drugs are put through the approval process because only those with a good chance of being a block-buster will repay the effort and cost, and the ones that do make it cost much more than they might otherwise. An indirect effect is reduced competition among drug manufacturers. Additionally, there is less profit to be used for what used to be public-service drugs, e.g. specialty drugs that would fight a rare disease or kill a rare pathogen, but would never recover all their costs. This is all done in the name of safety, but we forget the only truly safe place is six feet under.