Healthcare Nightmare
By Wes Keene | February 11, 2010 | In Category: Health Care
2010 medical bills are expected to jump 9%. That’s actually a little lower than in years past. With an economy that stinks and few jobs on the horizon, what drives these kinds of estimates?
Technically, there are lots of reasons. When supply and demand shift for various products and services the cost differences rarely pan out evenly across the sector, industry, or much less the economy as whole. One reason is wider access, and a shortage of supply. For all the talk of people dying on our streets, more people have medical access than ever before (although really everyone always has it because hospitals can’t turn patients away). The most striking reason for the increase, which isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, is the aging of baby-boomers.
As baby-boomers age, there aren’t necessarily any more doctors of nurses than there used to be. This means the same number of hospitals treating a growing numbers of patients. Actually, you’d be lucky to build a hospital now, due to Nixon’s twisted vision of cost containment.
It’s not a great time to become a doctor either. Despite numerous attempts to hammer out a health care bill, no one has managed to successfully keep the trial lawyers at bay in either of the two bills before the chambers of Congress. These trial lawyers are the asbestos, disability, mesothelioma confidence men you can catch on TV if you don’t work…surprise, surprise. These guys make sure that everything negative that happens in or near a hospital has a price tag associated with it. A price tag they will happily share 10% of with you.
Then there are overall usage trends. We simply take more drugs and are more obsessively paranoid about our health than we used to be. This results in lots of needless trips to the doctor, unnecessary tests and scans, and of course, more prescriptions. Since no one actually pays for these drugs, tests, scans and visits themselves, they get packaged into your premiums. Regence.com has documented many of these cost drivers. Clearly, Americans do not have direct control over all of them, but they do have some control. Expecting to lower basic health insurance costs without addressing usage, is folly.
Any plan presented by Congress or the President must address the cost primarily, not the coverage. Putting everyone on insurance will simply ensure that we add the most costly individuals to our rolls. People who are forced to buy something they don’t want will overuse it, out of spite. People who have been dropped, have been dropped for a reason…they are expensive to carry. Sad but true, medicine is a business like everything else. Adding these two classes of people to the insurance pool serves exactly the opposite of the President’s stated purpose of bending the cost curve.
In a purely political move, Health Care Reform became Health Insurance Reform sometime early last year after the public revolted at the idea of rationing, death panels and other necessities of socialized medicine. Changing the name doesn’t change the intent of the bill, however. Either it will be Health Insurance Reform which will drive insurance companies and their 2% profit margin out of business entirely, or it will be Health Care Reform which will necessarily seek (perhaps painful) method of reducing cost.
Of course, none of these ideas are politically very popular (only the leftist fringe believes that Government would be a good replacement for insurance companies), and so the political reality of the situation is that any reform will simply grow our deficit further, or be so watered down that it achieves virtually none of it’s objectives.
Given this situation, why are we working so hard to reform the system? When we let people pay for their own care, they will continue to grow tired of rising costs, then they’ll change their habits. Of course, that won’t solve Medicare, but nothing will. The fix for Medicare is to end Medicare. I’m not trying to be insensitive to older Americans, but the system never should have been created and it’s a liability. Nothing but massive tax increases (which are always on the table) or serious rationing will fix that. So why keep investing in a broken system? Well, it’s the Progressive Way.
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