by Jack Lee
Here’s how we fix overly expensive Healthcare in the United States. But, before you begin reading, here’s one little caveat, it will likely never happen. Our current congress is too divided, too spineless, too incompetent or too much in the hip pocket of trial lawyers and insurance companies to see these changes made into law. We’ll need a virtual revolution in the way we vote to get change made!
1. With or without universal healthcare, (A) the U.S. must put lawyers on a leash and this will mean a low cap on insurance settlements, $250,000 maximum award. This will help tremendously (B) Even more helpful will be to return competitive pricing to the insurance industry. Insurance companies have been price gouging on malpractice insurance. Their costs are rising more than any other healthcare cost factor and so are their profits. It’s a great time to be in the health insurance business. Price fixing and collusion are the likely culprits for spiking insurance premiums. Note: When we have a group of doctors self-insuring we see they have vastly less expensive malpractice insurance premiums than traditional insurance coverage.
We need to investigate the many ways we can reign in malpractice insurance premiums and get as many lawyers out of medicine as possible.
2. Let each state manage their universal healthcare or break it down to regional management. I can see where some smaller states or low population states could have something like a bi-or tri-state region healthcare system. The feds pay, the state adminsisters – simple. This would save on overhead, limit the growth of federal government and keep healthcare budgeting and management close to the people it serves. European nations that have done this prefer it to a single federal system because it is far more cost effective and responsive to the people.
Note: Denmark has 5 healthcare regions that provide excellent low cost healthcare. For example, Denmark spends $3362 per person for healthcare and we spend $7290 per person. Why are we spenbding so much? Their healthcare access is exceptional, ours is inaccessable to too many citizens caught between good private pay and welfare paid. By the way, we spend almost $15,000 per year on healthcare per prison inmate in California or 5 times the average cost in Europe. A urologist recently charged California’s prison system $2,036 an hour to treat inmates. An orthopedic surgeon billed the state for 30 hours’ work – for a single day. But, I digress.
3. Let patients control their own healthcare premium by determining how much co-pay should be.
4. We need to engage in a researching why it is that US spends 16% of GDP on healthcare, France 11%, Germany 10%, Canada 10%. Why? The answers would help us find the right system, but we’ve had no dialog on this in Congress. One side gives us a “shut up and take it plan” and the other side says they have no plan, but more or less they just say we oppose the oppositions plan….that isn’t helping. We must investigate to see what is working; see how we can save money and provide better service to cover more people.
In Europe the ratio of doctors to patients is 316, in the USA it’s 1 to 416. How can they turn out more doctors that the USA? Did you know that in Denmark general practitioners work under a contract. Those doctors providing specialized care, such as a cardiologist have the highest level of compensation. They have very good healthcare and there’s no shortage of docs. Again, they have more doctors per person than we do.
Americans are spending too much money on our healthcare and a good portion of the excesses are for near pointess, yet very expensive tests. This is done more as a CYA factor for doctors than it is to help patients. Secondly, expensive tests are done because investment in costly technology must be justified. Probably 70-80% of extremely expensive testing could have been avoided if doctors were not pressured to using these services.
Conclusion: Obama is pressing ahead with a “one size fits all plan” that would be a total disaster for the US economy. We need access to a low cost healthcare system, but his is not it. We should also preserve our free market system for healthcare. Both, the universal and free market system, could coexist… if we wanted it that way and I think we do!
Unfortunately, Obama’s side didn’t look hard enough at all the options before they forced their one version of universal healthcare on us. They didn’t bother listening to the people and what they wanted. That created the backlash as we saw in the last election, but I don’t think they really got the message. We need to toss a whole lot more dems out of office before we can make any headway.
The fact is, 90% of Danes are happy with their form of universal healthcare and that begs the big question: Why hasn’t anyone examined why their system if it works so well? We need to ask a whole lot of questions and learn what works and what could be used here. But, in Congress we’re simply not doing that, it’s an all or nothing situation. No wonder only 13% of Americans approve of them, and thats the lowest rating in our history.
One big difference that might matter quite a bit is the size of Denmark in comparison to the US. Denmark is smaller than the state of Arizona by about a million people. Youre talking about a health care system that is smaller than the Kaiser group (by about 3 million). Of course its easy to manage!
Denmark does not share Americas illegal immigration problem and they deal with those who do come for drug treatment:
The real kicker, however, are the taxes. (Wikipedia entries a bit out of date, 2005, but serve as a guide)
The cost for health care in America began to rise starting in 1965 when Medicare was formed. This is not surprising. In addition to care we now must pay for a large inefficient bureaucracy as well. The problem then was that we had so many aging people living at or near the poverty level who could not afford healthcare. Im pretty sure that even with health care this statistic has not changed much if at all. Perhaps a better problem to address would be why so many people in the (once?) richest nation on earth are unable to better care for themselves. We have pumped trillions of dollars into education, welfare, health care and other subsidies and programs and still Americans do not plan and save for their own futures. This is the real disgrace; that we have become an entitlement society and have failed to adequately educate our people about money and uplift our less fortunate through education and training.
This is the land of the free. We can do better but it will take the will of the people to shift our priorities!
If educators were properly schooled to teach toward true empowerment, the ability to adequately care for oneself, that would make a big difference.
If our society began to value not only education and training but morals and values that would make a difference.
If parents took more interest in raising strong, disciplined, well mannered and appreciative children it would really make a difference.
If more US citizens were willing to be responsible for themselves and their families the numbers of people needing public assistance would be few and manageable. I prefer to think of America as a country that can accomplish this goal rather than settling for becoming a quasi manoral serfdom as is found in Denmark.
All of those “we are the world” types need to refocus away from political activism and toward personal activism in their own neighborhoods! We could turn this pup around in 20-30 years. (Of course they’d have to sacrifice their freebies and their vices…LOL) But hey…they’re the ones who keep tryuing to fix this in ways that don’t work. Why not do something better; something that works; something that really has the potential to make a difference! Teach people to be productive contributing citizens!
OK…I’ll get down off the old soap box now.
“… and the other side says they have no plan, ….”
Nice to hear you acknowledge it, anyway.
I don’t suppose you’d admit to having listened to any of NPR’a series this week on health care rationing, as it is practiced in other countries. (We’re not quite ready to acknowledge that it is already practiced here.)
Today we heard from a writer who lives in the UK and who (shamelessly or not) used the death of a friend as fodder for a novel. Her friend died, miserably, here, trying to fight an incurable cancer (mesothelioma).
Here in the U.S., lawyers and medicos make themselves big bucks off this particular and, as it now stands, incurable cancer.
In the UK, they’ve got the guts to tell you: “you’re gonna die.” You get state of the art palliative care … and the lawyers and medicos can go bugger themselves.
They’ve got the better deal.
Tina, you have spoke words of wisdom, for sure, and we agree in principle. The size of the country does make it easier to manage, no doubt about it. Also Denmark doesn’t have our massive illegal immigration problem that is a huge draw on our limited resources. But, the point is we’ve failed to investigate what works, what could work and instead we’ve launched headlong into massive federal healthcare plan with all sorts of crazy loopholes, opt outs, and costly mandated coverages for people who don’t require them.
We need to ask a lot more questions before we obligate ourselves to yet one more bloated federal agency.
I think its fair to use Denmark as a model, because if you break it down to percentages it is a scalable system. It’s all about the plan, not the taxes. The taxes the Danes pay are for a myriad of things other than just their healthcare, you have to compare apples to apples. What they pay for healthcare is half of what we pay and they get better coverage. That is what we have to look at and figure out how they did it.
We are currently spending (as a percentage of GDP) more than any European nation for our healthcare and it doesn’t reach nearly enough people. Where did we go wrong and where did they do it right? This is important to know and there just has not been enough study to come up with a good plan for America.
There are tens of millions of Americans who fall into the gap between affordable private insurance and tax subsidized healthcare and they have no healthcare plan other than to pay out of pocket until the money runs out. That is a problem in terms of preventative medicine which is cheap and pathology treatment which is expensive.
It is a serious problem when Americans, even well to do Americans, can go broke paying for a catastrophic health issue. Their hard earned fortune should not be stripped away from to pay for an ill spouse because the insurance ran out or they couldn’t get coverage because of a pre-existing condition. This is just plain wrong and I endorse looking at our options and investigating ways to fix this serious problem. Medical access is costly and getting more costly by the day, something must be done to end the price gouging, the monopolistic practices, the ridiculous tort claims and such that are driving up costs far beyond mere inflation or justifiable R & D. And yes Tina, we need to get tougher on the scammers, cheats and frauds who have been exploiting Medicare. That’s inexcusable and we’ve not done enough to punish those bums.
We spend hundred of billions on humanitarian gestures around the world, but this is one humanitarian gesture I would endorse spending on because it is at home. We can and we should do better – the system is broke and we can fix it if we have the collective will. I absolutely believe we can solve the problem of affordable healthcare for the vast majority of those who want it. No plan will be ever be perfect and some will not take advantage of it no matter how good it is. In such cases, we shouldn’t try to force people onto it either.
Jack: “But, the point is we’ve failed to investigate what works”
I disagree, Jack. What works is what the USA was built upon…a free market. High health care costs and all of the restrictions and mandates in coverage were brought to us by government intrusion into the system. We know what works, we just have a large segment of the population that thinks government is the answer & must take care of us.
“instead, we’ve launched headlong into massive federal healthcare plan with all sorts of crazy loopholes, opt outs, and costly mandated coverage”
No argument there!
What they pay for healthcare is half of what we pay and they get better coverage.
Is that an apples to apples comparison? By what standard, or criteria, is this conclusion drawn? We know they dont pay billions for illegal carewhat else might be different in their system? Im suspicious, Jack, because there is a liberal agenda to destroy the private sector and healthcare is one big chunk of it!
I endorse looking at our options and investigating ways to fix this serious problem.
We can start by looking at regulations. Cato argues that this is a large part of the problem:
In Massachusettes, where they instituted a state run health care plan, they found that 69% of subscribers were illegal alliens who received $33.8 million in taxpayer funded in patient hospital treatment in one yearif you build it they will come! (estimate by the non-partisan Pew Hispanic Center)
For most Americans the solution to high costs is to put the power back in the hands of the people and to get government regulation that blunts competition out of the way. Once those costs come down there will be a lot of room to give assistance and better care to those who need it.
I dont mind the idea of studying the Danish system for ideas, I just would never back a universal, government run system.
PS Libby is wrong about conservatives not having solutions. They can be found in abundance on conservative sites on the Internet.
Tina, the free market method should work, I grant you that. But, do we really have a free market system? I think not. Cato is right, we’re over regulated and that adds to our overhead. Too many attornies = too many lawsuits. Lou Dobbs is one of the few good journalists at CNN and he did an excellent series on healthcare. I’ll try to find it on the net, it would explain a lot of my concerns.
Jack our concerns are very much the same. One of the ways to return to a free market is to create loads of competition. Another is by giving the power of choice back to the people.
If healthcare is broken and your solution is to look at something that works why not look for a free market model? Heck…why not apply the same reasoning to the free market and look at what makes it less free?
Geeez…we should at least try what the republicans propose before throwing in the towel to a socialist, high tax model.
Absolutely, free market is first on the list.
The Affordable Care Act is a free market plan, not “government run” healthcare.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/dec/16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care/
“PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.
Readers of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times’ independent fact-checking website, also chose it as the year’s most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin. (Their second-place choice was Rep. Michele Bachmann’s claim that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to India, a falsity that still sprouts.)
By selecting “government takeover’ as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.
The phrase is simply not true.
Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “The label ‘government takeover” has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a ‘takeover.’ “
Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “The label ‘government takeover” has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a ‘takeover.’ ”
An increase in government authority that mandates participation and incentivises toward the government option is EXACTLY what Obama/Pelosi/Reid planned. They would happily destroy the private sector!
Long ago the communists told us they didn’t need to use force on America because we would accept Marxism gradually on our own. This is just another step in the long march…and Obama and his minions KNOW IT!
As Rich Lowry wrote:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/26/how_obamacare_threatens_your_health_plan_97192.html
Dumb luck indeed…cheered on by very dumb useful idiots!
It isn’t a lie to call this a government takeover when you can see where something will lead and you say so. It is a warning! Government mandate and free market do not belong in the same sentence! We have let this thinking go on for far too long.
This is America! Of course we want everyone to receive good care. But we don’t have to give government ever greater “authority” to fix those few problems that plague the industry. Most Americans are happy with the care they receive, even the uninsured are happy. They are also happy with their insurance.
A very simple piece of legislation could repair most of the problems that plague the industry. Tort reform, portability, allowing people to form groups to purchase insurance, and other suggested reforms would only take about 300 pages and would not create more expensive bureaucracy.
Americans deserve the chance to see how these types of reforms would work and polling shows they want that chance:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/most-americans-happy-health-care-they-have-now_519491.html
So how much did Obama spend per day on his trip to India?
Wasn’t it Obama who assured Americans they could keep their private healthcare plans, that costs would come down, and that all Americans would be insured. The plan hasn’t yet been fully implemented and all three of these declarations have been proven to be false.
There are more errors in speaking (and thinking) from this administration: The Obama administration said the stimulus would create jobs. His administration said the unemployment rate would not go higher than 8% if the stimulus package was passed! Unemployment grew! (The President and his administration were never criticized by a media that refused to report negatively about him or the realities of his policies):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/08/obamas-stimulus-promise-m_n_212420.html
http://www.mrc.org/bmi/articles/2010/Journalists_Still_Hiding_Obamas_Broken_Promises_on_Jobs.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100610060328AAv5i6e
Yes that’s also true…they consider the possibility of 10% unemployment for ten years and then claim their policies work!!
So far they are working best for those BIG BANKS that were bailed out in deals with this administration and the party that created the legislation that caused the bubble that created the biggest world wide economic/credit crisis e-ver!!!
THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL is that MARXISM or FACISM are, in ANY OF THEIR NUMEROUS DISGUISES, GOOD FOR THE PEOPLE.
In fact they enslave the masses and creates misery. The cost is lost liberty, property, opportunity, identity and creative urge.