According to the President and his allies in Congress their version of health care reform will cure all ills of the system except perhaps getting people to actually take the medication they are prescribed.
According to the proponents of the current legislation health care costs will be reduced, abusive insurance companies will be reigned in, the federal deficit will be lowered and the massive new entitlement will be fully paid for, the health care cost curve will be moved lower and millions of American will be added to the health insurance roles. For good measure, we will all benefit from high quality affordable health care.
Who in his right mind will vote against such a program?
Think about all of those promises and then think about the legislative history of Congress is managing entitlements, fully funding them or for that matter leaving them untouched for more than one session.
You see, we all want the things being promised, we all want to win the lottery too and lose weight without changing our diet, but that is not going to happen either.
A close look at the message reveals that making health care affordable means subsidizing those in the lower income bracket. Giving money to help people buy something that is too high cost to begin with and escalating at more than inflation is not making health care or even health insurance affordable.
Taking fraud and waste out of Medicare is great (I have asked before why it has not been done long ago), but it does not help the deficit or debt if the savings are spent elsewhere.
Blaming health insurance companies for rising health care costs and holding them up as the group that does nothing to control costs is deceiving and directing people away from the more important focus on the provision and payment for health care services.
Eliminating underwriting used by health insurance companies sounds great, except if you are already insured and start to pick of the cost of new adverse selection in which case your premiums are not going down, but rather higher and even higher to accommodate the new mandated benefits. Remember, we already know that up to 25% of the cost for health insurance is there because of mandates from the various states.
If you mandate that everyone have health insurance but put no limits or restrictions on when and how they get it you are asking for people to opt in only when they have a need for health care. Ask the folks in Massachusetts.
Saying the new programs are paid for in full when you know that gimmicks are being used to time the new revenue and expenses to make it look sound and that the new long term care program is being used to generate revenue for five years is not being honest.
Saying you are controlling health care costs while you void a law that lowers physician payments under Medicare, says perhaps there are higher priorities.
Expanding Medicare at a time when the program is going broke is not a good strategy.
The message is quite clear; we are not accomplishing the original goal of reforming health care in America. Most Americans desperately want to fix the system; we must fix the system. No American should go without health care or the coverage to help pay for it. However, we should not have our common sense clouded by this noble goal, we need to think longer term, strategically, address the underlying problems in the system first and make Americans understand the consequences of each element of the system that has to change. This, “we can have it all” mentality and the abundant use of scapegoats is leading us down a path toward financial ruin, but more important, no fulfillment of the promises being made.
I have spent the last forty-five years managing health plans, serving on the boards of HMOs, a state health benefits commission, writing about health care and its costs, trying every new strategy that has come along. I embraced wellness programs, high deductible plans, promoting generic drugs, educating plan participants and all the rest and here were are no closer to the solving the real problems driving health care costs.
[picapp align=”left” wrap=”false” link=”term=protesting+for+health+reform&iid=6798241″ src=”7/2/5/3/Senate_Finance_Committee_e60d.jpg?adImageId=11115865&imageId=6798241″ width=”380″ height=”257″ /] The most tragic thing about what we are doing now is that people believe either we are solving the problems or are so frustrated they just want to do anything.
My grandson recently received six stitches over his eye; the doctor on call for the emergency room charged $3,000 for those stitches and did not participate in the health plan. My wife had a drain placed in one ear in a ten-minute outpatient procedure in a facility partly owned by the surgeon. The facility bill was $13,100 and was paid in full by my coverage. These are but minor examples of what is wrong with health care in America, this is what drives premiums higher and higher. These fundamental issues (especially in the private sector) are not addressed under the current version of health care reform and thus affordable health care will remain unattainable.
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