Healthcare
The Left Says
Healthcare is a right, not a privilege, and everyone should have access, regardless of their ability to pay.
The Right Says
Those who are healthy, and those with the means should not be required to foot the bill for those that don’t take care of themselves. The whole point of purchasing insurance is to avoid excessive financial burden when medical troubles arise.
The Solution
Treat healthcare like a public utility, so we standardize the rates for all procedures1. Publish all costs, using plain English, not obscure billing codes, with no surprise charges 2. This will address the spiraling cost increases. Medicare works – not perfectly, but pretty well, considering the complexity. Make it an option within the insurance marketplace, but fix its pricing structure, which is largely determined by the AMA through their Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee 3. This will give commercial insurance premiums a benchmark and allow consumers to make informed decisions. Insurance profits are a drain on the system, and do not improve healthcare. Commercial insurance should be marginalized, but remain an option for those who want to pay to prioritize extravagant/experimental treatments. These are the temporary fixes to get us to the real solution. Keep reading.
Recognize that ensuring Universal Coverage is not synonymous with having a single-payer system. The way to move from a Medical Services Marketplace to an actual system that improves health is to have community Health Stations (just like Fire and Police). Build one for every 10,000 people to handle all primary and dental care. Since we currently spend about $10,000 per person per year on medical services, we are talking about $100 million annually that could support each health station. That is obviously an insanely high number, but this is what we are already paying! Some of that total needs to go to regional hospitals and specialty centers for catastrophic and disease-specific situations, but we could obviously spend much less for much better care, without the 10 – 20% waste currently going to insurance profits and the medical billing staff that physicians need to interface with insurance just to get paid, not to mention all of the aggravation we have as consumers in trying to navigate medical insurance. (All of this from the very useful book, “Health Care Revolt”, by Dr. Michael Fine.) Next, have national labs produce off-patent pharmaceuticals and provide them at cost. Finally, make medical school free, and pay for it with unsubsidized tuition for specialty training 4, because we don’t need nearly as many plastic surgeons as we do family practice docs.
1 The Case for Single-Price Health Care
2 An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back p. 272
3 Casino Healthcare – The Health of a Nation: America’s Biggest Gamble p. 48 – 53