Blue Grass Red State

Have to repost this excellent article from Marcus Carey at BluegrassBulletin.com

Let’s Be Honest About “Health Care”

EDITORIAL

I just saw a TV commercial pushing the message that “It’s Time” for everyone to have “health care”.  It displayed the politically correct assemblage of racial and age diversity as one “ordinary” citizen after another told their tales of woe.

A working class white guy had lost his job, and now his family didn’t have “health care”.  An older woman said that her husband had heart trouble and they couldn’t afford treatment.  A black woman said that the cost of her “health care” had doubled and “who can afford that”.

Let’s be honest, what they are talking about is “health insurance” not “health care”.  The choice of words is important.  Surely those who support the socialist notion of a government run health maintenance organization (G-HMO) have run these terms through a focus group and learned that by inserting the word “care” in place of “insurance” that personal sympathies run more in favor of their game plan.

And second, we need to be honest about why the costs of health insurance have gone up so much.  The answer is very simple, new and improving technologies have emerged to treat and cure human health issues as a result of the open market place incentive to make a profit on these technologies.  Patients want the benefits of these things and as a result doctors and hospitals buy them.

You can get from home to work on horse back and a horse only costs a few hundred dollars.  Or you can drive there and back in a Mercedes which costs a lot more.  If you want the best medical treatment in the world, you must accept the fact that it will cost more.  The best medical treatment in the world is available only in America.

Now don’t go jumping to the wrong conclusion and equate my analogy with the argument that good medical treatment should only be available to those who can afford it.  That’s not the point, because that’s not the case.  The point is that the more sophisticated and technologically advanced methods of solving a problem will necessarily cost more.  In fact, the high cost of “health insurance” is directly related to the fact that the best medical treatment in the world is available for free to every American.

The government mandates that hospitals cannot turn away a patient who cannot pay.  In other cases the poorest among us already get free medical treatment through medicare, medicaid, medical cards and similar government programs.  Government employees, retirees and military personnel get free medical treatment through government programs too.  And it is precisely because of the way those government mandated or supported programs are run that the cost of health insurance is so high for everybody else.

When a hospital makes available the most technologically advanced medical treatment in the world and is required to give it away free of charge to those who cannot pay for it, guess who ends up paying for those people?  The rest of us.

When the government tells a doctor or a hospital that even though the price of providing a service in the open market is $300 but they will only pay $100 for those covered under a public program, guess who ends up paying the rest?

When the poorest in the country get thousands of dollars a month in medical care absolutely free, guess who is picking up that bill?

The real problem is that the government has decided that through one program after another that millions of Americans must receive free or reduced cost medical treatment in an environment where the open market place has inspired the development of the best medical technologies in the world.  The whole issue then is not “medical care” it’s “medical costs” to everybody who has been suffering higher prices for insurance due to the current forms of government “meddling”.

Talk of “free government health insurance” for everybody is simply a lie.  You can’t really believe that anything is really free can you?  You know somebody will always have to pay for it.  The question is who?  Should those who work pay for those who don’t?  We went through a period just a few years ago where we witnessed the success of welfare reform. Government run HMO’s would be the largest expansion of welfare in our history.

Take Kentucky for example. The availability of affordable health insurance in Kentucky nearly disappeared a few years ago when a democratic administration insisted upon requiring all health insurance companies to provide coverage to anyone who applied despite pre-existing conditions.  Suddenly, for the payment of a few months premiums, people with long standing diseases were in a position to make these companies pay out millions upon millions of dollars for treating pre-existing illnesses.  This drove many companies out of the Commonwealth, and drove up the price of insurance for the rest of us with the ones that remained.

The cost to the government of insuring everyone will be staggering.  To bring down the cost to the rest of us, it would be much cheaper to re-think the scope of the program.  Here are a few suggestions.

If the Government would just increase the amount of it’s reimbursements now being paid under government programs medical providers would not have to pass along the difference to the rest of us, and the government would not have to insure everybody.

Instead of giving hospitals an unfunded mandate to provide free care to those who cannot afford it, the government could jump in and pay for the free care mandated for those who have no insurance and who do not participate under a government sponsored program.  This too is a much smaller group than insuring “everyone”.

If the federal government gave every American a dollar for dollar tax credit for any money paid for medical insurance and out of pocket medical payments at the very least they would save the administrative costs of collecting the tax dollars first and then doing the same thing with them.

And finally the federal government could increase the tax breaks given to employers who provide medical insurance to employees free of charge and increase the tax benefits given to insurance companies for the amounts they pay in claims.  This would immediately put more earned income into circulation, help the economy, avoid creating another bloated federal bureacracy and speed the payment of claims thus reducing costs to medical providers in the area of claims processing and collections.

The heartfelt commercials crying that people need free “medical care” are emotional appeals packed with lies.  It’s time to be honest about the matter.