Protect patients not health insurers
JACK E. LOHMAN
Capital Times, Madison, WI
February 16, 2007
Of all of our health care needs, government protection of insurance company mega-profits should not be on the list of needed reforms.
But that apparently won’t stop President Bush, who is now proposing an annual $7,500 single and $15,000 family tax credit for citizens who are either unemployed or whose employer has dumped their health insurance. This would enable them to purchase directly from the insurance company to help them retain their profits.
Bush also made his usual plug for health savings accounts, for which Wall Street, the credit card industry and bankruptcy attorneys will forever be in his debt.
Tax credits are not the answer. We should be providing health care directly to the patient, not through third-party insurance companies.
Follow the money. These are taxpayer assets being given to the insurance industry for non-health care services - when the insurance industry shouldn’t be getting a penny of our health care dollars. Much of their services are an unnecessary part of the process and are largely dispensable. They consume 20 percent of health care dollars yet provide absolutely zero health care benefits to the patient.
That’s a shameful waste.
We need administration; not insurance. We should totally eliminate the unnecessary costs that are consumed by marketing, broker commissions, huge executive salaries, and high corporate profits.
None of these would exist under a single-payer system like Canada’s. With a strong political will we could mimic Canada’s system and extend health care to 100 percent of the public, and we’d spend the same amount of dollars we are spending today to cover only 85 percent of the people.
To boot, we can do it without Canada’s wait times! The money saved would be spent on more doctors and more nurses to serve more patients.
The state must implement a universal health care system, and the proposal by Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, and Rep. Chuck Benedict, D- Beloit, provides the mechanism to bring health care to all residents by July 1, 2008.
The logical approach would be to contract with an administrative service, like Medicare does with WPS in Madison, and any of the current insurance companies would be candidates to serve the state in that capacity.
But whenever waste is trimmed people are displaced, and some of those people can be used in administering the new program and others retrained for more critical jobs like nursing, medical technologists, and even by moving some into higher paying programming positions that will be needed to convert our massive paper-based medical records system to an electronic patient database.
There are other health care proposals, but none are as extensive and none are as simple.
With added complexity comes costly administration, the very thing we must eliminate if we are to afford the system. With single-payer, the patient receives services and the administrator writes the check. It’s that simple.
We’d incorporate BadgerCare and Medicaid patients and funds, and we’d cut worker compensation and auto insurance rates in half because the medical portions of those are handled by the universal system. And we’d not be hampered by federal laws that prohibit negotiating for lower drug prices, so our single-risk pool would enable us to maximize the economies of scale.
The Miller-Benedict proposal is not just the best system for the public, it is also the most business friendly proposal on the table. It will attract more companies and more jobs to the state than the others, and fewer businesses and jobs will be lost. Initially it would be funded by a payroll tax and the transfer of funds from the other systems it replaces.
What’s not to like about that?
Our current problem is not funding, it is political.
Some politicians claim that the government can’t do anything right and they will fight to privatize the system. I’d probably buy that argument were it not for the fact that government-run entities cannot give campaign contributions and private corporations and their executives can. And they do, because the last thing in the world they want to see is our health care system made more efficient.
But it is time for politicians to put politics aside and do what’s right for the people.