Blog of Bling #20- Musings on health care

Seeing as how my life is so.... normal right now for the first time in a while and I've inconveniently committed myself to writing a blog entry at least once every two weeks, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the whole health care reform that's going on in the states right now. Yawn... i know, but you can't make the highlight reel every week.

Frankly, this whole issue hurts my head. 1.) Everyone in the richest nation in the world should be insured. PERIOD, the end. It makes sense for the uninsured and the insured. The uninsured (obviously) don't put off simple procedures and then have to deal with the chronic disease or costs that come later. The insured benefit from not having to "pick up the cost" of the transferred bill from the uninsured. No brainer. Plus we are the richest nation in the world and its embarrassing.

So what's the best way to do that? I have no idea. I'm afraid the insurance and pharma companies have their claws way too deep into the issue for real change (but if I was them, I'd hang on for dear life too). As I have lots of friends that work for insurance brokers, I don't know if this is blasphemous or not, but does it really make a lot of sense for Insurance companies to be for profit? With low overhead, they would work quite well for the insured and the company. But these gigantic corporations, with tremendous bueracracy can't possibly keep the cost of a simple medical procedure down, if the procedure has to pay the time of the doctor, nurses, and the 10 accountants the paperwork had to go through to get approved.

Anyway, rant aside, when you have business people making medical decisions (or in the case of pharmaceuticals) pushing more medical decisions, its not surprising that the patient and the doctor have lost out. Its important to note that I don't think most doctors are to blame for the skyrocketing costs. Between the cost of malpractice insurance and medical school debt, they are probably under-payed for the risks they are accepting.

Which leads us to reform. I'm not exactly sure what they mean by a public option, based on the response of the pundits. Here's what the government should do though. Create a cheap, non-for-profit alternative to private health care. Require that every citizen be required to have medical insurance and that the cost via public option should be deemed by the person's tax bracket.

I hear the conservatives going crazy over this option though, saying its going to put private insurance companies out of business. Sure, its going to cause them to change the way they do business and they might not make the killing they make right now, but isn't competition the crux of conservative economics. Do they really think that with all the governments beauracracy that a private, well run company couldn't outcompete the public option?! Hell no! What they are really saying is that the insurance companies are making too much money right now for the system to change.

So what's actually going to happen: The only option left is for the government to pick up the large bill of the uninsured which is too expensive. So then they'll change it to subsidize only a portion of the uninsured, in which case what's the point anyway?! The country will end up with more debt and no result. Big business will have yet again triumphed over the less than wealthy.



I'm definitely not in my expertise area, so thoughts?