Health care mandates - another bailout?
On the one hand, I strongly support the goal of universal coverage for all Americans. And I agree it has to be affordable to everyone. But the Obama plan, high-minded though it may be, has some serious shortcomings showing up in the deliberations in Congress.
They say they’re going to require all Americans to get health insurance. And they want to subsidize coverage for families making under $88,000 per year. That might sound good, but it’s going to drive up costs by piling everyone into the same broken system we have now. When more money is available to pay for a particular good, but no new supply is created, it will become more expensive. You’ve simply altered the supply and demand curve.
Real reform will come when public health care is managed by a national health system of some sort, one where every level works exclusively for the benefit of the patient rather than profit. The fundamental shortcomings of the health care system we have today are that it makes more money from sub-standard care than it does from superior care, and that costs go up at every stage of delivery for administrative and procedural reasons that do not improve patient outcomes.
For those who have been priced out of the current system, the proposed plan will get them into the health care system at a point other than the emergency room. That alone will be a positive, since about 40% of emergency room visits can be treated ahead of time by preventive care, and at a much lower cost. But the underlying problems that cause health care to be so expensive and at the same time so ineffective are being ignored. And with the subsidies and mandate, we’re essentially throwing the health insurance industry a few hundred billion dollars in taxpayer money that we can ill afford to spend.
If this bill passes without major changes, then the best I can hope for is a wash, where my health insurance premiums plus my taxes add up to about the same as they are now. But except for the uninsured, I suspect most of us will probably get screwed when one or both increase.
A public plan would help, since it would be sure to have lower administrative costs and be able to place some sort of cap on provider costs, but it won’t improve the standard of care. And simply placing a cap on those costs doesn’t do anything about the fact that a hospital makes a lot more money when people have to be re-admitted because they didn’t get the treatment they needed on their initial visit.