Why Health Care is Killing Us

“Seven Democratic candidates for president promised Saturday to
guarantee health insurance for all, but they disagreed over how to pay
for it and how fast it could be achieved.” (NY Times Article) Well, awesome! Polls everywhere confirm that’s what America wants. But it’s not as easy as a political promise.

There are lots of people that are making lots of money on the current system.
They profit for inefficiency, regulation, and limiting access to care.
Some want the government to take over everything. Turn our health
system into a kind of Medicare - Post Office. Hmmm. One thing’s for
sure, we need something vastly better than what we have.

Recently I was in a small cafe and saw a plastic canister with a
photocopied picture of a child in need of a $300,000 surgery to remove
a brain tumor. The canister was for donations. The child’s parents
worked at the cafe and everyone, their co-workers and regular
customers, were pitching in to raise money. These hard working parents made too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but too little to have adequate health insurance. Two thoughts went through my mind. First, their only real option was to have the surgery and declare bankruptcy.

(About half of American bankruptcies are caused by stratospheric medical bills not covered by insurance. That’s right; lots of us have health insurance and still go bankrupt.)

Second, this is absolutely nuts. We live in the only first world country in the world where full time, hard working people have to beg for money to take care of their children’s medical needs. We all see it. Homemade donation canisters for uncovered medical expenses are on store counters in every town in America. Think about it. The only countries where people have to beg for money to be cared for is us and countries run by thieving dictators who don’t care about their citizens. Too strong? You might not think so if you were trying to raise money for your child. Or you
had your medical insurance claims denied based on a trivial technicality, which also happens to millions of us each year.

So now, every politician is talking about universal health care. Talk is cheap. What’s outrageous is the cost. Empty promises mean nothing. The solution isn’t schemes to make it illegal not to own health insurance or new programs to cover prescription drugs which will cost presently uncalculated hundreds of billions of ours and our children’s tax dollars a year. Of course access to quality health care is essential to 21st century civilization. That’s a given. But it’s the wildly escalating costs of health care that must be stopped. The health care system is a crazy hodgepodge of old processes, individualistic doctors, inefficient hospitals, financially driven insurance and drug companies, non-sensical regulations, and bewildered, frightened and frustrated patients all competing in a jungle of self-interests. The result is not efficiency and quality predicted by a free market of voluntary exchange but the opposite. We lead the developed world in cost and in death by medical errors. The American Medical Association estimates over 800 people a day die in American hospitals due to avoidable mistakes. That is more than an “oops.”

We just aren’t getting much for all the money we spend. So it’s silly to work on access to a ridiculously expensive health system when the system is broken and cost of subsidizing it will bankrupt us. We have to re-invent the whole system of health prevention, education, and care. It starts with us. Most of us need a healthier diet, more exercise and less work and debt-induced stress. We all know that. Next, there are many islands of excellence where costs are lower and quality is higher in US health care. These include doctors, hospitals, and insurers that work collaboratively, employ technology, and specialize in specific illnesses and treatment. It’s just applied common sense without the barriers of bureaucracy and greed.

We can fix health care and create universal access with the right leadership. But if government subsidizing the current system with our tax dollars is the only solution, heaven help us. Because we’ll all be broke and dying sooner than we need to.

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