Posted on 05/02/2002 7:42:08 AM PDT by Aeronaut
The politicians are pushing to raise the cost of your health insurance again.
Of course, that's not how they describe what they're doing. They claim to be exercising compassion when they propose to force insurance companies to include mental illness in every health-insurance policy.
Politicians love to posture as friends of particular groups – women, children and people suffering from a particular disease – by forcing insurance companies to cover some medical procedure that's important to a target audience. But every time the government (state or federal) forces insurers to include another benefit in your policy, your premium has to go up.
So it isn't surprising that over three decades the cost of health insurance has risen spectacularly.
Do you need it?
Depending on the state you live in, your health insurance may be priced to include mandatory coverage of chiropractors, acupuncture, naturopathy, marriage counseling, abortions, drug abuse, alcoholism, treatments to stop smoking, cosmetic surgery, weight loss, wigs and other hairpieces, Christian Science practitioners, and dozens of other possibilities.
I have nothing against any of these treatments. But it makes no sense for the government to force you to pay for such coverage if you'd prefer a cheaper policy. Just as when you buy a computer or a cell phone, you should be able to select and pay for only the features you need and want – not what the politicians think you need.
As the politicians keep pushing up the cost, every medical interest group suffers. So most of them go to Washington (or the state capitol) to lobby the politicians to provide relief by forcing insurers to add their favored treatment to the mandatory coverage – pushing the price up further.
Losing health insurance
It may be hard to believe, but back in the 1950s health insurance cost just a few dollars a month for most people – and it was available to virtually everyone, including people with pre-existing conditions.
The percentage of people covered grew steadily from the 1940s. And by the early 1970s, almost 90 percent of Americans were covered by some form of insurance. Then the politicians went to work to load up policies with mandatory coverage of all sorts of conditions that may be of no use to you. More and more people decided that insurance had become too expensive and decided to risk being uninsured. By the 1990s coverage had dropped to under 70 percent of Americans.
In addition, many employers decided health coverage was too expensive. In 1980 fully 97 percent of the companies with 100 or more employees provided medical coverage. By 1995, only 77 percent were doing so.
The growing number of uninsured people gives politicians more ammunition for more programs to force more costs onto insurance companies, and to push the price of insurance still higher.
How HMOs became so powerful
The cost of insurance is only one area where the politicians have ruined our health-care system.
You may have noticed that they're also pushing for a "Patients' Bill of Rights" – supposedly to give patients certain privileges in dealing with health maintenance organizations.
No one is pushing for a "Bill of Rights" to protect patients against doctors – or against druggists, supermarkets, computer stores, or interior decorators. So how did HMOs become so powerful and dictatorial that their customers need protection?
Nearly 30 years ago, Congress passed the HMO Act of 1973 – which subsidized HMOs and gave them a preferred position among employers. The Act was finally repealed in 1995, but by that time HMOs had become thoroughly entrenched as the centerpiece of employer-sponsored health programs.
Once again, the politicians are seizing the opportunity to save us from their own handiwork.
The solution
The solution to all today's medical problems is to get government out of health care.
At a minimum we need to:
End Medicare, so that seniors and everyone else can have low-cost health care again, as well as access to all treatments and tests a doctor thinks advisable.
End Medicaid, to stop the senseless waste of money by corrupt state medical agencies.
End the federal regulation that has driven so many charity hospitals and free clinics out of business.
Repeal all the state and federal laws that tell insurance companies what benefits to include in their policies.
Make all medical expenses deductible on your income tax return, so your employer can raise your salary instead of providing insurance coverage – letting you choose the health care system most appropriate for you, deducting the cost directly from your income tax.
These are the kinds of solutions that show real compassion for the sick and the vulnerable.
And that's why no politician is proposing them.
Harry Browne is the director of public policy at the American Liberty Foundation. You can read more of his articles and find out about his network radio show at HarryBrowne.org.
Regards,
First benefit: about 20% of the cost of health care is the administrative cost of performing all of the billing and accounting procedures needed to satisfy Medicare and the thousands of insurance companies, all of which pay different amounts for every procedure.
Second benefit: The cost of what is being done for the patient again becomes a consideration. It isn't at this point in time.
The criminal Clintons aside, if you paid the health care premiums the way I have for the last 22 years, you would see that the escalation started long before those two swine arrived on the scene. It can be traced all the way back to the first government intrusion in health care. I don't think I have a dull eye.
I wondered how long it would take to turn the subject to the author instead of what he wrote.
Third party payers are surely part of the problem, but isn't it easy to use more government force, as you are proposing, to "fix" the problem rather than stopping the circle of force?
In this scenerio, you would replace the people who force others to their solution, with yourself. To use force to make them use your solution.
Government caused the problem, it is not the remedy.
Not difficult to believe at all. In 1930, heath care was even cheaper . In 1900, it was cheaper still. In 1800, it was hardly a consideration.
Government intervention is a huge part of the problem of couse but blaming the cost solely on that is a simplistic analysis.
In 1950, you could not buy a pacemaker, a hip replacement, a CAT scan, Lipitor or a bovine heart valve replacement no matter how much money you had.
Government should get out of the market but that will never make the care some people may need affordable. We're going to have to accept that there can be no equality in health care anymore than there can in transportation. Some can buy a modest car, others a Lexus,others a Ferrari and some travel on private jets.
Just the handful of sell-outs at the top of each organization, be it a hospital, HMO, corporation, etc.
Briefly, there's a triumvirate of organizations who maintain the status quo.
1.) Insurers like to keep the bills nice and high, so as to keep their percentage cut large.
2.) Hospitals like to keep the bills nice and high, so as to keep facility fees huge. (My old hospital would charge Medicaid or an insurance company $3000 for a one-night stay in the hospital for a tonsillectomy patient. When the cash-paying plastic surgery patients and their surgeons needed THE SAME exact service, the quote they got from the hospital was $300!!--ONE TENTH!! That will give you some idea of the REAL price of a night's stay in the hospital. It's high but not crazy high.)
3.) Third, the Federal and State governments like to keep the bills nice and high, because it justifies tons and tons of administrative spending, posturing, and gives them ammo to keep the voters in a low-grade panic about the future of health care. (Guess which party traditionally benefits from such panic-mongering.)It also gives them a huge pool of lobby-dollars from the other two oligarchs in the triumvirate. It's all very corrupt, you see.
The solution to all this is not banning health insurance, rather, free health insurance, with the natural outcome being Medical Savings Accounts, and high deductibles: These lead straight to low premiums, and also lower routine costs.
Health care could easily cost one third of what it costs now, with huge incentives possible for joggers and other health-conscious persons. Nothing like that is being explored under the current cartel system, I wonder why.
Just let the market do its thing.
Oh yeah, this just in... Congress is trying to stamp out the overwhelmingly-popular Medical Savings Accounts, which have heretofore been allowed to only a handful (less than a million) citizens on a "trial basis".
Why do you think the triumvirate is so threatened by MSAs?
Not too hard to figure out.
When it comes to medicine, there are few Americans who are not radical equalitarians. If that rich guy over there can afford a triple by-pass or a heart transplant, I darn well should be able to afford one too is the thinking
The problem is there is no possible way, even if we had a free market, for everyone or even a large segment of the population to afford all the high tech care available. And that means people will demand more and more government intervention. You and I will be taxed so people who cannot pay for a half a million dollar operation get one.
This is where the Libertarian Party always fails. The LP dogma goes nowhere when a society's deeply held moral convictions, in this case equal access to medical care, are in opposition to it.
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