The market's the problem with health care
Marketplace
NPR
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Some Fortune 500 CEOs this week announced a coalition to push for health care reform. But commentator Jamie Court says what they’re really seeking is a government bailout of insurers and drug companies.
KAI RYSSDAL: There are two things you can mention to almost any CEO in this country that will provoke an immediate response. One’s global warming and how to balance protecting the environment with protecting the economy. The other’s health care and how companies can protect their bottom lines.
Safeway CEO Steve Burd launched a health care reform effort this week. Burd and three dozen other Fortune 500 CEOs are calling for a market solution.
Commentator and consumer advocate Jamie Court says that’s great, but the market is the problem.
JAMIE COURT: Some of the biggest names on the Fortune 500 say they want market forces to fix the problem of high health care costs. So they support the government making every American buy health insurance.
The irony is that if insurers had made health insurance affordable and available, we wouldn’t need the heavy hand of government to force individuals to buy policies.
The likes of Safeway, PepsiCo, General Mills and Pacific Gas and Electric don’t have a plan to effectively rein in health care costs. They don’t do anything about the inefficiency and profiteering of drugmakers or health insurers whose premiums have risen 250 percent more quickly than the rate of medical inflation.
That’s probably because insurers Aetna, Cigna Healthcare, Pacificare and drugmaker Eli Lilly Co. are part of the Safeway coalition too.
If the employers don’t want to pay premiums, fine. They should just admit the market doesn’t work and turn the job over to the government by expanding Medicare. That’s how it’s done in the rest of the industrialized world, where there’s far more efficiency.
The World Health Organization ranked the USA 37th of 191 countries for “overall health system performance,” 72nd for “level of health,” and first for “health expenditures per capita.” And there’s no way that mandatory health insurance is gonna help those numbers.
Real universal health care means getting every patient access to doctors, hospitals and prescription drugs whenever they need it, so that sick patients don’t get sicker. And that saves money.
Instead, these companies back turning government into a collections agent for private insurers. That leaves American citizens bearing the burden of big costs and high-deductible insurance policies that discourage early treatment.
That’s not reform. It’s a bailout for insurers and drug companies that refuse to be accountable for the high prices they charge and the paltry health care they provide.
RYSSDAL: Jamie Court is the president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.