Posted on 06/18/2002 12:42:31 PM PDT by TheRedSoxWinThePennant
Universal health insurance makes ‘business sense’
November 2, 2001
By ROBERT F. SMITH
Herald Correspondent
BELLOWS FALLS — Single-payer universal health coverage could save Vermonters more than $118 million a year over current medical insurance costs and cover every Vermonter in the process, according to a new report. The study, paid for by a federal grant and prepared for the Office of Vermont Health Access by John Shells and Random Haughty of the Lewis Group, was the center of discussion Thursday night during a Health Care for All forum. The forum was organized by Windham County Democratic Reps. Michael Obuchowski and Carolyn Partridge, and was held at the New Falls Cinema in Bellows Falls.
About 75 people attended, many of them local doctors, health-care practitioners, mental health counselors and politicians. Several spoke out in favor of the single-payer universal health coverage concept, and no one disputed its value. The guest speaker was Dr. Deborah Richter, a family physician with the Cambridge, Vt., health center., who said the main problem with the U.S. health system is not that millions of citizens are uninsured or that it costs too much. The problem with the country’s health system is that it doesn’t really have a system, she said.
The U.S. has what she termed a “loose arrangement” that wastes billions of dollars in administrative costs created by the vast number of different health insurance companies offering various health plans and all requiring different types and amounts of paperwork.
“It’s cheaper to pay directly for the medical costs than to pay insurance premiums,” said Richter, who is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program. “Every other industrialized country realized this long ago.”
Several health professionals agreed that administrative costs had gotten out of hand. A woman who manages a clinic said that nearly every patient the clinic serves has a different kind of insurance coverage requiring its own special paperwork, and one mental health professional said she spends half of her working time filling out forms instead of treating patients.
Richter explained that 70 percent of health care costs are spent on just 10 percent of the population, while the majority of people, 80 percent, account for only 15 percent of health care costs. Healthcare administration, which involves mainly paperwork, overhead and bureaucracy expenses, is responsible for 24 percent of all healthcare costs she said. In the past 30 years there has been a 2500 percent increase in the number of healthcare administrators, while the number of healthcare practitioners - doctors and nurses - only increased by 159 percent during the same period. The Lewin Report showed that under the current system, Vermont residents will spend $2.2 billion on health care in 2001. The report estimated that a single-payer program would provide coverage for everyone in the state — including the 51,000 estimated to be presently uninsured — and still save $118 million, mostly by reducing the administrative costs of health insurance programs.
Under a single-payer program health coverage would be paid for by a payroll or income tax. This arrangement would mean that taxpayers making less than $75,000 a year would see an average yearly decrease of more than $1,000 per family over current health insurance costs, while those earning $75,000 to $100,000 a year would see a nominal increase of about $58 over what they currently spend for insurance. Hardest hit would be families earning over $150,000 a year. Universal health coverage could cost them as much as $4,500 more per year.
Rockingham physician Dr. Matthew Peake asked Richter who in Vermont would oppose universal health care and such dramatic cuts in healthcare costs.
“Did you miss the parts about getting rid of insurance companies?” Richter replied.
She said that universal health care administered by the state would eliminate the need for insurance companies, and these companies are very wealthy and influential.
“Every poll taken shows that two-thirds of the American people are in favor of this,” Richter said. “The problem is that insurance and pharmaceutical companies have more money than we do.”
But Richter said that it is inevitable that universal insurance coverage will be adopted, and she said that she is confident Vermont will lead the way within the next five years. And while there have been problems with the program in some countries, she said that Vermont and the nation could examine all the universal coverage programs now in use around the world and find out what has worked and what hasn’t.
The bottom line for Richter was that she felt single-payer universal coverage would allow her to concentrate on medicine and not on paperwork.
“The good side of this is that I’d be able to focus on practicing medicine without having to worry if my patient could afford it,” she said.
Richter and several others at the forum agreed that the key to creating a national universal health care system was to educate the public on its benefits.
“In general, this is a better deal for businesses,” she said, “and they know it. It’s common sense, and it makes business sense.”
For more information about universal healthcare, and especially how it affects Vermont, go to http://www.vthca.org.
The problem is the entire idea of first dollar coverage. If insurance were run like insurance is supposed to be, most people would not deal with it in a given year. I don't need medical insurance to cover a trip to the doctor for a sore throat and a week's worth of antibiotics. I need insurance for when a bear bites my leg off and I come hopping in with my leg and want it reattached. Just imagine what car insurance would cost if it covered oil changes too.
< / Karl's Insurance Rant #4>
Unfortunately, that statement is probably true.
As a civil defense lawyer, IMO, medical malpractice suits are difficult to win for plaintiffs. Juries still do not like to rule against doctors. The high premiums come not from the amount of suits filed, but the potential for financially staggering awards for pain and suffering.
Thru tax incentives and mandatory coverage, the government has effectively stifled competition in the market for health insurance.
The basic concepts of insurance should be required curriculum in high school.
The urbanite yuppie preppie population is smart enough to understand that "universal healthcare" is code for forcing 40 million *healthy* uninsured individuals to pay for unhealthy individuals who won't pay.
Where universal healthcare has been tried, it has failed and the best its proponents can do is to advocate that it wasn't done right and must be tried again, or better that it can't work unless made mandatory on all persons.
There are countless countless countless anecdotes of persons feigning illness for disability and prescription narcotics. There are large bureaucracies behind these woe-is-me charlatans, filled to the brim with social workers overriding MDs orders based on growing their government "service" business and preserving "investments" in our communities, yada yada yada.
We know their song and dance.
Universal healthcare is a component of socialism, pure and simple.
Anyone notice how the propaganda about the millions of homeless and the millions of uninsured *children* has died down the past couple of years. If such a large segment people existed that were truly in dire straits, we would be hearing it daily. Such garbage originated from political agendas, not reality.
That's been true for as long as I can remember. And eliminating general damages might reduce your stress level, but all in all I bet you love your work anyway, don't you?
Of course government bureaucracy could run it so much more efficiently.
In fact, most of the paperwork in healthcare is produced by the government's involvement.
How do these myths persist in spite of all experience?
Bad business practice. She uses otherwise billable time for non-billable work. Hire another clerk to do the paperwork, and use the time to see two more patients a day, and make money.
As usual, socialism is attractive to people for whom business and economics is a mystery.
California should be sending campaign checks to Gary Mendoza for state insurance commissioner. Mendoza has stated that he supports the Medical Savings Account system!
Someone tell Leaky Leahy that a single payor system ends his personal privacy rights.
If you want to improve the cost of healthcare, remove the anti-trust exemption for insurance companies and redo the specialty boards/medical associations.
Millions of dollars of funny money are flowing between pharmaceutical companies and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Family Practice. These three organizations give recommendations to federal government on drugs, vaccines, and testing to be reimbursed. There is a clear conflict in interest in the existing system of recommendation.
Furhermore, there is no incentive to the major medical boards to quantify the results of their testing. In fact, there is no oversight on any of the major specialty boards and most are run by a small group of politically active liberals. It is particularly odd that vaccines are critical in national defense, but no medical board exists to either teach or test physicians in how to use a vaccine.
But I bet they love to rule against HMOs. It's easier to be generous with money from a large corporation than it is when you actually see the individuals who are being robbed.
An excellent point that doesn't get nearly enough mention in this debate. In Canada private medical information is routinely leaked; the most recent (publicized) occurrence in Toronto was just last year when a truckload of billing records were left in a downtown alley for the regular trash pickup because the Ministry of Health never bothered training its clerks on the importance of shredders. Then there's the Orwellian-named Privacy Act- every time they amend it they expand the list of agencies that are allowed access to medical billing records.
Sounds like the old, tired argument for a planned economy. Why can't they figure out that competition makes things better? More centralization and regulation will only make the quality go down and the price go up.
Insurance should be separate from employment.
A popular fallacy promulgated by the national socialist insurance planners is that somehow it would 'reduce' paperwork and bureaucracy. Medicare has over 100k pages and counting of rules and regulations, and growing. Medicare is about as bad. Another fallacy these folks like to point to is that overhead costs to the government represent only about 6 percent of total program costs.
I don't actually believe that, but even if true, they never take into account the unfunded mandate costs borne by the physicians and hospitals which have to submit to reams of paperwork and refusals, and deal with the patients who cannot begin to understand why Medicare won't pay for this or that. In other words, the government costs shafts the private sector with the bureacratic costs it inflates every year by imposing new rules and regulations in order to grow its own budget and preserve its status quo. There will never be an efficient or smaller bureaucracy with a national health care plan.
Finally, to the doctors who support socialized medicine because they think being disconnected from the costs would allow them to practive medicine, I say to them "grow up." Part of any profession is learning how to manage resources. This guy is an ignorant and lazy idealist, and one can imagine what would happen to health care costs when people like this are given a blank check to spend money.
Disagree. Real choices lead to competition and while not all prices will necessarity be lower, their true costs will be closer to reality. The trouble is, there are too many false choices. The goverment legislates far too many mandates to be included in health insurance policies and plans. Deregulate health care, make individuals responsible for choosing and purchasing health insurance and make their insurance as deductible as business can.
I do not propose this would alleviate all health insurance problems, but a lot of the so called problems would go away and solutions for the real problems would become more apparent.
Finally, medical care is undervalued in this country because someone else foots a lot of the bill. Medical care is expensive, and will continue to be expensive. Get used to it.
As a physician, I am confronted daily with people who don't blink an eye at paying 50 dollars for a nail job, or a hundred dollars for a hairstyle, but who scream bloody murder because I have the audacity to ask for a 20 dollar copay for my services.
I'm afraid you are correct. It's common knowledge in the medical sales field that doctors are easy marks. It should also be mentioned that this is one of many problems.
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