The Message We Are Not Hearing
What should be the number 1 issue for the 2012 Presidential race? Should it be the size of government? Should it be excessive regulations? Should it be the deficit and the debt? Or maybe it should be a plan to get people back to work?
How about none of these.
It is not that these issues are unimportant. Rather, there is another issue which affects everyone, every business with employees, and every tax payer. It is the US health care delivery system.
Briefly, while health care in certain US institutions and medical practices may be the best in the world, not all Americans have access to that care due to availability or cost. Worse, many Americans do not even have access to any health care except when they are really sick and throw themselves on the mercy of hospital emergency rooms.
In addition to access, there is a cost issue. The current US health care delivery system is most costly in the world and offers health care costs that rise yearly at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. The total US health care spend is close to $3 trillion, or about $9000 per American citizen.
Some questions that would be illuminating are:
1. Why is the US health cost the highest (by 30-40%) over the next most expensive other country?
2. Why is the average health care recipient not receiving the best out comes in the world if the US system costs the most?
3. Why are employers now the main conduit of health care insurance coverage?
4. How is it possible for Drug companies to charge lower prices for sales in other countries than what they charge in the US?
5. Why is there so little apparent effort to eliminate waste and theft from the current system when this figure conservatively could be in excess of $300 billion annually?
6. Why is it satisfactory for insurance companies to take 20 cents of every dollar of benefits for administrative costs and profit? What work do they actually do to justify this type of profit model?
These may be important questions, byt is health care the most important and urgent 2012 issue?
I would submit there are two main reasons.
First, common sense will teach us that it is a finite resource. At 20% of our annual GDP there is a natural limit to how big it can get. This presents the question “how should health care be made available to Americans”? Should it be rationed by who can afford it? Or, should it be rationed by who comes first?
Second, regardless of how the country decides to ration health care, its cost and how Americans pay for it are critical questions. With middle class wages relatively flat for the past 40 years, health care costs are eating more and more into discretionary spending. With less discretionary money, the middle class becomes less a factor in our country’s economic growth.
Dealing with how to ration health care, should prepare the country to discuss how to reduce government spending and sensible regulations. Dealing with the deficit and debt become more likely if the middle class sees a stop to their personal budget’s hemorrhage due to health care costs. And employers who were free from being the middle man in health care financing, should be more ready to hire workers.
Both access and cost are relatively easy to describe as problems but are both difficult to change. There are, to be sure, valid world models where outcomes are better and costs are far less. These models are drawn form geographically smaller and ethnically narrower countries so direct scale up may not be straight forward. There are, however, many good starting points.
Never the less the US system is on an unsustainable path. There could not be a better year than 2012 to tackle this problem.
This entry was posted on January 17, 2012 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Politics, Republican Party, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: affordable health care act, debt, deficit, health care, health care costs, universal health care
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