The Health Care Debate
America, we must deal with a basic reality. Once we render our freedom and turn something over to the government to run, we will never regain that freedom. Government programs do not operate to achieve excellence or innovation, they respond to apparent crises and political influence. Grasping the big picture or the human element gets lost in the never ending maze of regulations and policy considerations.
The Democratic Party and some special interests groups are attempting to scare us into believing our health care system is in deep trouble and only the power of the Federal government can save it. One would have to be totally unplugged from the news to not be aware of much of what they propose to do to “solve” the problem. There’s no getting around the hard reality that these measures would represent the greatest transfer of private responsibility to the government in the history of our republic, and it would mark the greatest undertaking, the most expensive, the most far-reaching, of any responsibility the national government has assumed since the formation of our republic over two hundred years ago.
When looked at in totality, no where in the world is better health care delivered than in the United States. More people benefit in more significant ways than some of the countries those beating the health care “reform” drum look to as models for how to change our system. Unquestionably, the United States leads the world in all major advances in medicine. Whether we consider advances in treating cancer or developing advanced medical technologies such as Magnetic Resonating (MRI) devices, all of these remarkable breakthroughs come from research hospitals and industries in the United States. Institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and the Cleveland Institute among many others lead the world in medical innovation in overcoming horrible diseases and conditions and providing new techniques to improve care. Many forms of cancer are easily treated and regular citizens get on with their lives as a matter of routine here in the United States but in advanced countries like Great Britain, the treatments are deemed too expensive thus making significant treatments unavailable to the population. Important tests like MRI’s capable of identifying so many medical needs are routine in the US. In many metropolitan areas, just about every community has facilities with such equipment providing almost on demand service for such tests. Elsewhere, such tests are either denied or the waiting list goes on for weeks or months because providing the resources to provide MRI’s never are adequately budgeted. Thousands of injured people are rescued every year, treated, and survive horrible injuries that highly trained EMT’s and shock trauma teams save as routine every hour every day. Care reaches the victim at lightening fast speed and the injured are quickly flown to the appropriate trauma center capable of working in rapid precision delivering life saving support.
The United States does have some significant problems to overcome, but the public must not be mislead by emotionally laden appeals to their fears to justify measures that could destroy our advanced capabilities. They’ll trot out statistics comparing our system to some of the socialized nations that never adequately reflect the variables that render those statistics misleading. Given the size of our country and some social problems that don’t exist in more homogeneous smaller countries, our medical system deals with health needs that don’t exist elsewhere. That we have over 300 million citizens of varied backgrounds and needs, how could the government possibly devise a one size fits all approach.
Our country faces issues that must be addressed.
First, too many citizens lack health care coverage. The cost of health insurance is too expensive for small businesses and many self-employed citizens to afford. Extending that insurance on to entire families is even more prohibitive. Additionally, citizens with preexisting medical conditions which would draw from health insurance policies making them unprofitable to issue are written out of obtaining policies or have stipulations that any treatment that stems from their established ailment cannot be covered. Given how many medical needs interact, that can be the license to deny all kinds of care.
From World War II forward, American citizens have looked to their employers as their providers for health insurance. As long as a person maintains employment with the same company, care continues; however, in the late 1900’s and the beginning of the new century, more and more people change jobs frequently and maintaining continuity of benefits is difficult.
The cost of typical health care insurance, coverage that most citizens find most satisfactory is escalating in cost at alarming rates putting severe strain on employers to continue to provide. Generally, the smaller the business, the higher the cost. Workers are so accustomed to health care being a basic part of their terms of employment, they don’t see the continued coverage of their health benefits as increases in their overall compensation, they never grasp just what’s at stake. If an employee makes typical middle class wages from $40 to $75 thousand a year, his health insurance could easily cost more than $300 a month an additional $3,600 a year as part of what the employer pays to sustain his position. While workers expect to see their salaries increase as their experience and expertise grows through the years, much of that potential salary is gobbled up by rising health insurance costs, a factor transparent to employees who are not keenly aware of the challenges their employers face.
For individuals and families lacking insurance, the cost of paying for health care is out of reach leaving only trips to the local hospital emergency room as their means of obtaining care. Such events clog emergency delivery centers making it increasingly difficult for them to respond to the real emergencies, but they are mandated by law to treat all who enter. The hospitals and clinics then absorb the cost of such visits as they will never be able to be compensated for such events.
Current statistics indicate about 30% of the population is either not insured or severely under insured. Does addressing that need justify destroying the methods of coverage enjoyed by the vast majority of the population?
The government has failed miserably considering how perhaps special assigned risks pools can be established to provide health care for citizens labeled with “preexisting conditions.” For the number of potential people affected, this is a problem that can be easily resolved.
Many approaches should be considered for those who cannot afford health insurance. If society believes that providing health insurance should be an employer responsibility, the barriers that make health care so prohibitively expensive to small businesses that lack the buying power to obtain the kind of care larger employers provide can be overcome. One consideration would allow small businesses to join associations or coops where they could join other small businesses pooling their resources and being able to buy insurance on behalf of the association’s buying power not that of the individual company’s. Business models for such services already exist in enterprises like credit unions.
The roll of government then can be reduced to what is typically its roll to begin with, providing care for those who fall outside the regular system – the government “safety net” approach. However, for the government to succeed at this, we must examine where they do provide health care outside the privileged ranks of government employees and elected officials and see how poorly they currently handle their tasks. Medicare and Medicaid are in a state of crisis. Mismanagement, unrealistic funding allocation, bureaucratic regulation where administrative decisions interfere with doctors’ judgments, and inability to properly define and defend against fraud have rendered these systems in severe danger. The implication is clear to all of us. If the government is failing miserably to adequately manage Medicare and Medicaid, how can they possibly take on the responsibility of the entire population? This consideration alone should torpedo any government run universal health plan.
Current laws and practices create barriers to providing quality affordable health care. Health insurance is issued on a state by state basis. If an insurer in Pennsylvania can provide a better benefit for a Maryland citizen, why shouldn’t the person from Maryland be able to buy from the Pennsylvania insurer? Once such regulations applied to the banking industry, but banking is now an interstate business.
Portability is another key issue. If a person is provided an adequate insurance option, why can’t a person stay with that insurer as he or she changes jobs?
Over the years since employer provided health care has become the norm and paying for health care has become too expensive for people to afford on their own, a web of confusion and inefficiencies have grown into a choking maze of confusion that needs to be attacked and eliminated, but how and by whom?
The Federal government can reduce regulations that inhibit providing quality health care. They can also provide support and stimulation to motivate innovation while providing oversight against fraudulent practices. They cannot run the system.
The current approach is not sustainable without some help, but the Federal government is not the answer and pushing it off to the states to resolve is not the answer either though states can do much more to work together to solve problems.
First, the objectives of health insurance and the scope of coverage need to be redefined. Consumers have come to expect that their health insurance should pretty much cover ALL their health needs where they can pay for $10 doctor visits and $5 prescriptions. Looking at what a person might realistically expect to pay for car or home repairs, might it not be reasonable to expect that a middle class family should pay for some of their health care?
Considering how much is spent on a person’s health care, cannot this same amount of funding be reallocated to provide the best possible outcomes? Can insurance be designed to provide absolutely full coverage for the most catastrophic outcomes and maintain treatment as long as needed so that the real devastation of lacking health coverage is eliminated? Would it be realistic to expect that average wage earners should be expected to pay for some routine expenses up to a certain cap before insurance coverage kicks in?
There is no question that prescription drug costs are artificially high given what patents and other special interest considerations the industry has been granted by congress. Look at how Wal-Mart can provide prescriptions for generic drugs at very affordable prices? If routine prescriptions were no more than $10 a month, would it not be reasonable to expect patients to buy their own medication?
Health care savings accounts are another option that have never been adequately explored and current methods have some rather unattractive strings attached. If individuals could have a small amount of each paycheck diverted into such an account that could offset routine medical expenses and cover some minor emergencies, would that not be a huge benefit. Such accounts would earn interest and be tax deductible. However, the current provision that all funds not used in a given year are forfeited turns many potential savers into not considering them as an option.
The goal should be to make insurance more of a total assurance to run deeper and longer rather than running broader. So much of health insurance goes to routine expenses that perhaps most wage earners could easily budget for.
Another benefit of having patients more directly paying for their health care is many more eyes monitoring the cost of care. A more consumer driven health care market would have to compete with others and work to become more cost effective operations.
These are just a few suggestions of things that can work to help provide more affordable and accountable health care. The Federal Government is not the answer. Let’s work forcefully to keep the government from more intrusion into our daily lives and stimulate the discussion on how we can obtain better health care while our great hospitals, clinics, industries, and universities continue to lead the world in medical advancements.
America, we must deal with a basic reality. Once we render our freedom and turn something over to the government to run, we will never regain that freedom. Government programs do not operate to achieve excellence or innovation, they respond to apparent crises and political influence. Grasping the big picture or the human element gets lost in the never ending maze of regulations and policy considerations.
The Democratic Party and some special interests groups are attempting to scare us into believing our health care system is in deep trouble and only the power of the Federal government can save it. One would have to be totally unplugged from the news to not be aware of much of what they propose to do to “solve” the problem. There’s no getting around the hard reality that these measures would represent the greatest transfer of private responsibility to the government in the history of our republic, and it would mark the greatest undertaking, the most expensive, the most far-reaching, of any responsibility the national government has assumed since the formation of our republic over two hundred years ago.
When looked at in totality, no where in the world is better health care delivered than in the United States. More people benefit in more significant ways than some of the countries those beating the health care “reform” drum look to as models for how to change our system. Unquestionably, the United States leads the world in all major advances in medicine. Whether we consider advances in treating cancer or developing advanced medical technologies such as Magnetic Resonating (MRI) devices, all of these remarkable breakthroughs come from research hospitals and industries in the United States. Institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and the Cleveland Institute among many others lead the world in medical innovation in overcoming horrible diseases and conditions and providing new techniques to improve care. Many forms of cancer are easily treated and regular citizens get on with their lives as a matter of routine here in the United States but in advanced countries like Great Britain, the treatments are deemed too expensive thus making significant treatments unavailable to the population. Important tests like MRI’s capable of identifying so many medical needs are routine in the US. In many metropolitan areas, just about every community has facilities with such equipment providing almost on demand service for such tests. Elsewhere, such tests are either denied or the waiting list goes on for weeks or months because providing the resources to provide MRI’s never are adequately budgeted. Thousands of injured people are rescued every year, treated, and survive horrible injuries that highly trained EMT’s and shock trauma teams save as routine every hour every day. Care reaches the victim at lightening fast speed and the injured are quickly flown to the appropriate trauma center capable of working in rapid precision delivering life saving support.
The United States does have some significant problems to overcome, but the public must not be mislead by emotionally laden appeals to their fears to justify measures that could destroy our advanced capabilities. They’ll trot out statistics comparing our system to some of the socialized nations that never adequately reflect the variables that render those statistics misleading. Given the size of our country and some social problems that don’t exist in more homogeneous smaller countries, our medical system deals with health needs that don’t exist elsewhere. That we have over 300 million citizens of varied backgrounds and needs, how could the government possibly devise a one size fits all approach.
Our country faces issues that must be addressed.
First, too many citizens lack health care coverage. The cost of health insurance is too expensive for small businesses and many self-employed citizens to afford. Extending that insurance on to entire families is even more prohibitive. Additionally, citizens with preexisting medical conditions which would draw from health insurance policies making them unprofitable to issue are written out of obtaining policies or have stipulations that any treatment that stems from their established ailment cannot be covered. Given how many medical needs interact, that can be the license to deny all kinds of care.
From World War II forward, American citizens have looked to their employers as their providers for health insurance. As long as a person maintains employment with the same company, care continues; however, in the late 1900’s and the beginning of the new century, more and more people change jobs frequently and maintaining continuity of benefits is difficult.
The cost of typical health care insurance, coverage that most citizens find most satisfactory is escalating in cost at alarming rates putting severe strain on employers to continue to provide. Generally, the smaller the business, the higher the cost. Workers are so accustomed to health care being a basic part of their terms of employment, they don’t see the continued coverage of their health benefits as increases in their overall compensation, they never grasp just what’s at stake. If an employee makes typical middle class wages from $40 to $75 thousand a year, his health insurance could easily cost more than $300 a month an additional $3,600 a year as part of what the employer pays to sustain his position. While workers expect to see their salaries increase as their experience and expertise grows through the years, much of that potential salary is gobbled up by rising health insurance costs, a factor transparent to employees who are not keenly aware of the challenges their employers face.
For individuals and families lacking insurance, the cost of paying for health care is out of reach leaving only trips to the local hospital emergency room as their means of obtaining care. Such events clog emergency delivery centers making it increasingly difficult for them to respond to the real emergencies, but they are mandated by law to treat all who enter. The hospitals and clinics then absorb the cost of such visits as they will never be able to be compensated for such events.
Current statistics indicate about 30% of the population is either not insured or severely under insured. Does addressing that need justify destroying the methods of coverage enjoyed by the vast majority of the population?
The government has failed miserably considering how perhaps special assigned risks pools can be established to provide health care for citizens labeled with “preexisting conditions.” For the number of potential people affected, this is a problem that can be easily resolved.
Many approaches should be considered for those who cannot afford health insurance. If society believes that providing health insurance should be an employer responsibility, the barriers that make health care so prohibitively expensive to small businesses that lack the buying power to obtain the kind of care larger employers provide can be overcome. One consideration would allow small businesses to join associations or coops where they could join other small businesses pooling their resources and being able to buy insurance on behalf of the association’s buying power not that of the individual company’s. Business models for such services already exist in enterprises like credit unions.
The roll of government then can be reduced to what is typically its roll to begin with, providing care for those who fall outside the regular system – the government “safety net” approach. However, for the government to succeed at this, we must examine where they do provide health care outside the privileged ranks of government employees and elected officials and see how poorly they currently handle their tasks. Medicare and Medicaid are in a state of crisis. Mismanagement, unrealistic funding allocation, bureaucratic regulation where administrative decisions interfere with doctors’ judgments, and inability to properly define and defend against fraud have rendered these systems in severe danger. The implication is clear to all of us. If the government is failing miserably to adequately manage Medicare and Medicaid, how can they possibly take on the responsibility of the entire population? This consideration alone should torpedo any government run universal health plan.
Current laws and practices create barriers to providing quality affordable health care. Health insurance is issued on a state by state basis. If an insurer in Pennsylvania can provide a better benefit for a Maryland citizen, why shouldn’t the person from Maryland be able to buy from the Pennsylvania insurer? Once such regulations applied to the banking industry, but banking is now an interstate business.
Portability is another key issue. If a person is provided an adequate insurance option, why can’t a person stay with that insurer as he or she changes jobs?
Over the years since employer provided health care has become the norm and paying for health care has become too expensive for people to afford on their own, a web of confusion and inefficiencies have grown into a choking maze of confusion that needs to be attacked and eliminated, but how and by whom?
The Federal government can reduce regulations that inhibit providing quality health care. They can also provide support and stimulation to motivate innovation while providing oversight against fraudulent practices. They cannot run the system.
The current approach is not sustainable without some help, but the Federal government is not the answer and pushing it off to the states to resolve is not the answer either though states can do much more to work together to solve problems.
First, the objectives of health insurance and the scope of coverage need to be redefined. Consumers have come to expect that their health insurance should pretty much cover ALL their health needs where they can pay for $10 doctor visits and $5 prescriptions. Looking at what a person might realistically expect to pay for car or home repairs, might it not be reasonable to expect that a middle class family should pay for some of their health care?
Considering how much is spent on a person’s health care, cannot this same amount of funding be reallocated to provide the best possible outcomes? Can insurance be designed to provide absolutely full coverage for the most catastrophic outcomes and maintain treatment as long as needed so that the real devastation of lacking health coverage is eliminated? Would it be realistic to expect that average wage earners should be expected to pay for some routine expenses up to a certain cap before insurance coverage kicks in?
There is no question that prescription drug costs are artificially high given what patents and other special interest considerations the industry has been granted by congress. Look at how Wal-Mart can provide prescriptions for generic drugs at very affordable prices? If routine prescriptions were no more than $10 a month, would it not be reasonable to expect patients to buy their own medication?
Health care savings accounts are another option that have never been adequately explored and current methods have some rather unattractive strings attached. If individuals could have a small amount of each paycheck diverted into such an account that could offset routine medical expenses and cover some minor emergencies, would that not be a huge benefit. Such accounts would earn interest and be tax deductible. However, the current provision that all funds not used in a given year are forfeited turns many potential savers into not considering them as an option.
The goal should be to make insurance more of a total assurance to run deeper and longer rather than running broader. So much of health insurance goes to routine expenses that perhaps most wage earners could easily budget for.
Another benefit of having patients more directly paying for their health care is many more eyes monitoring the cost of care. A more consumer driven health care market would have to compete with others and work to become more cost effective operations.
These are just a few suggestions of things that can work to help provide more affordable and accountable health care. The Federal Government is not the answer. Let’s work forcefully to keep the government from more intrusion into our daily lives and stimulate the discussion on how we can obtain better health care while our great hospitals, clinics, industries, and universities continue to lead the world in medical advancements.
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