Thoughts on Health Care

The biggest problem with this whole debate is that we're now only talking about Health Insurance which is NOT the point. The point is health care costs. I find it notable that there don't seem to be any non-profits in health care anymore when a little more than 20 years ago it used to be dominated by them. [Is that a result of Medicare? IDK]

So here are my thoughts on the problems with health care:

Fraud - We need to return to our ethical/religious roots. The best way for us to reduce fraud, is for us to have every church in the county preach that insurance fraud as stealing and to emphasize personal integrity and the evils of the LOVE OF money. [Note: Money is not bad, just the desire to get it unethically.] This will only reach a minority of americans directly, however, I think that the influence of this will be felt much farther than that.

Tax status - Currently employer paid health insurance is not taxed, but private plans are. This allows business to offer more competitive insurance and also allows the government to mandate that all employers offer insurance. The tax status should not be dependent on who or how many are paying for the insurance - whether a company, a co-op, an individual or just some random group of people, they should all be taxed the same. [Note that I am not say whether they should be taxed or not].

Defensive medicine - Tort reform. Enough has been said about this.

Consumer Oversight - The federal government (for some unknown reason, probably political payback) promoted HMO's and PPO's as the preferred method of insurance. This has had the effect of reducing the individual consumer's ability/responsibility to monitor health care costs. This allows practitioners to drive up costs through fraud (billing for work not done) and extra/unnecessary tests (defensive medicine +/- increasing revenue per patient). The first and BEST line of defense in holding down costs is the consumers. HMO's and PPO's provide convenience and the cost or eliminating this necessary check.

Medicare/Medicaid - The payouts for these services are so low that they are driving up the cost for everyone else.

Emergency rooms - Another unreimbursed cost is the inability of emergency rooms to refuse treatment to people without insurance. This again drives up the cost of treatment for everyone else as the cost of these ER visits are spread out over every other patient.

Bureaucratic waste. The medical insurance burden has increased massively as the insurance companies try to cut down on fraud and the government adds additional regulation as well as its own red tape due to Medicare. [I don't know how much this is exacerbated by individual states' regulations.] It should be relatively easy to come up with a universal health care form/format that can store all records electronically. Standards will have to be developed for exactly what information should be collected, how it can be stored (for both privacy and retention), and how it can be disseminated. These are not difficult problems.

Looking at this list tells me that we have a *very* broken health care system. I'm sure that it will be impossible for most of these issues to be addressed because people will get too upset about you "destroying the health care system". This system probably *needs* to be destroyed.

P.S. The democrat's plan doesn't solve or diminish ANY of these problems. And it would add more, most likely a whole lot more.