What Health Care for Who?
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What Health Care for Who?

Posted on November 19, 2009
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Spineless… 

is all that I can say about our current crop of elected officials that are debating the health care issue.

I cant think of one single issue besides the economy that is so important to the broad spectrums of Americans. Health care and its cost and quality affects each and every one of us in a deep and personal way regardless of our station in life.

Our country screams for a leader, the current 'leader' was given a mandate to bring change… yet the congress, senate and Obama can come up with nothing beyond a rehash of the same old cronyism and profit mongering that has brought us to this point to start with.

The time is coming to make some real change in our society. We have to be asking ourselves just what kind of a society that we want to live in, and what role we expect to play in it and just exactly what kind of a society we want to leave for our children.

There are many kinds of industries, products and services that serve us.

  1. Some, like hamburgers, are commodities that are provided for profit and minimally regulated. If you want one, you buy it at the price, and with the service that the market dictates. 
  2. Some things like fire and police are publicly provided funded through tax dollars and are available to all who need the services without prejudice. 
  3. Finally there is a class of services and products that are pseudo public such as phone, electricity and of course health care that are left to the private sector to provide but regulated heavily because of the essentiality of these services.

My simple question is why this last class exists at all. If something is so essential to society that it needs to be heavily regulated, why would we create and support costly regulatory boards saddled with the opposing requirements of assuring the guaranteed availability of the services and maintaining  profitability for the provider. With such diametrically opposed requirements, one will have to take the back seat and it is not hard to see which one would in our capitalistic society. The obvious solution would be to restructure them as public services and divide the administration and funding of the services between the federal and local governments.  Beyond that, I have to wonder how any rational society has allowed health care to remain in the hands of the profiteers in the first place. Is our health and our lives to be thought of as investments, costs, and assets on someone's balance sheet?

It has come time to make some real changes, to make a decision whether we are a society that has evolved to the place to value life above profit. Or have we 'evolved' where profit is valued about life?

  1. Health insurance and access to essential health care should be administered by the state governments and funded by the federal governemet. There is no needs for profits and dividends for stockholders, 'insurance' premiums should simply be a tax and low income people and children should be subsidized. Those subsidies or access to health care should be available to citizens at either public hospitals or thru a credit system for private hospitals. Competition works both ways.
  2. Health risks such as tobacco, alcohol, speeding, drunk driving, drug use(thru convictions and fines), etc, should be taxed at a rate commensurate to their burden on the health care system.
  3. At least one existing private hospitals should be acquired for a specified local population at cost and managed independently with a state board to assure parity between the hospitals and provide a base level of competition for private hospitals. There will always be room for those willing to go the extra mile to be able to garner a higher price but with no large public system anchoring prices things will continue to spiral out of control.
  4. An investment with the savings could be spent on education and promotion of prevention based programs would bring in a dividend as well. Though prevention and education will not eliminate disease and heath problems it can work to ensure a longer healthy life. This makes people more productive and more apt to consume bolstering the economy. The end result is that the inevitable health problems that are natural with an onset of age will on the average come later and need to be treated for a shorter period of time also reducing health care expenditures.
  5. Wages for health care workers should be indexed to an average wage index based on education and experience. The argument that talent will escape the medical field is hogwash. People do what they love, some of the most talented people on the planet are struggling artists, they do what they do because they love it and the same would occur in any field. Assuring a fair wage by indexing to a cross section of fields based on education and experience would create a wage structure that would serve to be a detraction to entering the health field. There would always be room for private doctors of exceptional skill to demand higher wages privately if their service could justify it.
  6. Drug companies should be nationalized and absorbed by the federal govt. as well. Drugs are developed, and marketed for the express purpose of profiting. This leads to too many drugs being prescribed and too much profiteering on needed and recreational drugs (viagra?) alike. We can talk about patents some other time and why I think they are a bad idea but the current situation is one where multinational drug companies take advantage of universities and have students and fellows do research and development on the cheap and then drug companies snag the patents and then charge outlandish prices that are far and away higher than is reasonable. Eliminating this by promoting research and development at the college level with no patents issued for the drugs would save billions and billions annually alone and provide additional funding for those research programs.

Of course, the arguments that comes up immediately is that it would eliminate a huge number of jobs and in our current economic situation, eliminating jobs is the worse thing we could do. Ridiculous. All this does is realign the economy in a positive manner. Making a massive adjustment that would occur with regards to health costs would free up money for consumer goods. Beyond that, it would create a healthier nation that would be more prone to spend money on consumer goods, education, etc. How could that be bad? Money flowing into the consumer sector would go for goods like hamburgers, cars, and TV's that would be produced on a competitive level and spur additional research in all manner of fields. This would create solid employment with good companies and serve to bring down costs on many items as well. The whole notion that changing the status quo would bring disaster is simple fear mongering driven by those that profit from regulated spending and a lack of competition.

This is the only rational solution to the health care issue. I won't hold my breath to see if the current group of leaders has the fortitude to make such a bold statement though.

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