By Craig Dupler / Herald Forum
The recent front-page article on the cost of health care and its impact on one small business by Will Greschke is spot on (“Everett small business owner struggles with insurance rate hike,” The Herald, Jan. 22).
There is an obvious fix to the U.S. health care mess, but to get people to support what must be done, first people have to understand what is going on. Way too much of our health care dollars are being consumed by the reimbursement war.
This is easy to see locally. Just go down to the Lynnwood campus of Premera Blue Cross and ask yourself what is paying for all of it and why? It’s the same sort of question one should ask oneself when standing in front of a casino with its lavish investment in flash. Who is paying for it and why?
Prior to World War II, a generally accepted value of Americans, regardless of political beliefs, was that it was seriously unethical to enrich one’s self from the health problems of others. Yes, we paid doctors well, but that was because of their added education and their esteemed position in our communities. Their pay was not out of line, and for the most part, it still isn’t.
What has gradually changed over the past 75 years is that we have turned away from the notion that health care is a public service to one in which it is a for-profit industry. We eliminated the U.S. Public Health Service and slowly, step by step, set up a system in which medical providers are at war with both the government (i.e. Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, and the Indian Health Service) and the insurance companies over reimbursement. Making it worse, we have moved toward a corporate ownership model with Wall Street profit pressures being imposed upon both the insurance industry and many care providers.
The resulting overhead rates combined with the greed-driven profiteering that goes with corporatization of any industry have resulted in overhead and expected margins to skyrocket as a result.
Let’s face it: Americans are extremely gullible and have fallen for this nonsense. Part of this may be due to our declining levels of education relative to the rest of the world. We were once the leaders in educating ourselves, but that’s ancient history.
Want to make America great again? Get yourself into a classroom. But in the meantime, we have to stop supporting this reimbursement war and profiteering in health care. The way to do that is to start a process converting the whole system to something similar to what every other industrialized country has done.
We need to convert to a national health service. That way the costs we are now paying for have literally tens of thousands of health care and insurance professionals hired to fight each other over how much and whether a payment is going to be made can be eliminated. Get rid of that, and the costs will shrink rapidly. For less money we can provide better care for everyone.
Capitalist greed and free markets work well for creating and selling widgets and toys. They are terribly inefficient and wasteful for critical public services, whether it is fighting a war or providing highways across vast rural spaces. We need to get better at recognizing and admitting to ourselves what sorts of activities and services belong in the private sector and which do not.
Craig Dupler lives in Clearview.
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