September 24, 2007
Sure, Guarantee
Health Care, But Mandatory Insurance Doesn’t
Hillary Clinton is
just the latest presidential candidate to offer up a prescription for
the ailing U.S. health care system. In basing her approach on the
personal mandate, which means forcing everyone to purchase health care
insurance, her plan makes the same mistake as most of the proposals
floating around.
It equates health
insurance with actual health care, and assumes that having said
coverage will solve the problem.
Nothing could be
further from the truth. Requiring all of us to buy health insurance is a
scam that benefits no one except the insurance industry. If we have no
choice except to buy their products or face legal/economic sanctions,
what incentive do the health insurance companies have to serve their
customers instead of themselves?
Zilch. Zip. Nada.
Take Massachusetts.
Bay State residents are now by law obligated to buy health care
insurance, but the insurers face no similar mandates to provide
affordable policy prices, to cover pre-existing conditions or to quit
the games that delay payments for months on end or deny it outright.
California is moving in the same direction.
The rest of us
should be so blessed. Where do I sign up to convince the government to
require that everyone buy my columns while leaving me free to charge
outrageous fees, refuse to write for certain people, and take all the
time I want to deliver on my contracts or even not deliver at all, with
no consequences?
No doubt on K Street
in Washington, D.C.
Not only will the
health insurance industry grow undeservedly richer if the personal
mandate becomes law, other businesses will stop offering health
insurance as a benefit, or require employees to foot the entire health
insurance bill. Shifting the cost of health care coverage away from
companies onto workers has started already under the banner of
“consumer-directed” health care, an epic mislabeling on a par with “one
size fits all.”
Health insurance and
its associated industry are part of the problem, not the solution.
Health care insurers spend at least 35 percent of their revenues on
costs that have nothing to do with funding actual health care, according
to Terry Brauer, CEO of Portland, Ore.-based HealthCare Management
Consultants, Inc.
Such
non-healthcare-related expenses include administrative overhead,
advertising and physician relations, lawsuits over denial of claims,
fraud fines, profits, etc. Let’s frame this in a more personal way. More
than one-third of every health care insurance premium dollar we shell
out does not come back to us as payments for actual health care services
or products.
What a ridiculous
waste of money. If we were ever serious about cutting the $2
trillion-plus we spend on health care each year, then private insurance
would be one of the first places to trim the fat.
Does this mean going
to a single-payer health care system? The longer this nation’s health
care crisis continues, the better a single-payer system modeled on
Medicare before the Bush administration tampered with it appears.
Medicare’s administrative costs have been estimated at anywhere between
2 percent and 9 percent, depending on the estimator’s opinions of
single-payer health care.
It doesn’t take a
math genius to look at the numbers and realize that even 9 percent
overhead beats 35 percent by a wide margin.
What we all want is
guaranteed access to quality health care that we can afford. Political
fixes that focus on insurance alone guarantee nothing of the sort.
© 2007
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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