Our health-care system is broken, but it can be fixed
Salt Lake Tribune
By Lauren O.Florence
On Oct. 26, Salt Lake Tribune business reporter Lesley Mitchell detailed problems created by the rising cost of health care for the employed. Employers are passing on to employees the double-digit inflation they are being charged by insurance companies for health-care coverage.
In the United States, what we pay for health care is increasing faster than in any other nation on earth. But not only is what we pay rising faster, it starts out higher than any other country. We pay about $5,000 per person per year for health care. The Bush administration estimates that we will be paying about $9,000 per person yearly by 2010.
Ms. Mitchell noted that escalating health-care prices stem from increases in costs for hospitals, demand for expensive tests and procedures, use of specialists and drugs. She failed to mention that health insurance companies continue to take higher and higher profits.
These health insurance companies take between 13 percent and 33 percent of the premiums paid to them. They spend this on their top management personnel who make millions each to administer health care that others deliver, on a huge staff devoted to denying care, and on expensive advertising telling us how good they are.
Health insurance companies are excellent investments and pay superb dividends. Any good portfolio has one or more health insurance company stocks. The amount spent on actual health-care delivery is called their “loss ratio.”
It has been estimated that if the insurance companies took only 15 percent more than they pay for actual care, we could save $500 billion per year. That savings would be enough to cover everyone in the United States with good health care.
Health-insurance costs have always been higher for smaller groups than for larger ones. The insurance actuaries say that big companies are less risky. They can charge less for the big companies because the big group has a larger “risk pool.” By that argument, we should put everyone in the country into the same large group and thereby create the largest risk pool that we possibly can. This would lower the premiums for everyone. We could cover everyone instead of just the people who have enough money to pay the 13 percent to 33 percent above the cost of health-care delivery that the insurance companies are extracting from us.
A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that more than half of all Americans want everyone to have health coverage. More than half are even all right with the government administering it if everyone is covered. To say that we can’t change our health delivery system because it’s not politically feasible no longer holds. Our citizens want a change. We want everyone covered.
We can afford to change if we take some of the waste out of the system. We can’t afford not to change. We will bankrupt ourselves while the health insurance companies continue to make profits administering health-care delivery.
The sources for the statistics in this essay can be found at https://pnhp.org. PNHP stands for Physicians for a National Health Program. About 9,000 physicians are members of this organization and are willing to take a stand for better health care for everyone in the United States.
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Dr. Lauren O. Florence is a plastic surgeon in solo private practice in Salt Lake City. She is also a founder and secretary of the Utah Health Alliance, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to finding a way to assure affordable, comprehensive, and equitable health-care coverage for all Utahns. The Web site is
http://www.utahhealthall iance.org
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