What do you get when you mix basic arithmetic with advances in technology?
You get the reason Health care gets more expensive with time. Prior
to the days of MRIs, chemotherapy, complicated surgeries, etc. health
insurance didn't have to pay to cover these treatments since they
didn't exist. Now that they exist, it costs money to provide them.
Furthermore, the people most likely to need them are the most expensive
to insure. In order to maintain a viable business model, insurance
companies must minimize costs and maximize revenue (which means screening
out customers likely to ever need kidney dialysis or chemotherapy,
and collecting premiums from people less likely to ever need expensive
medical treatment).
The same basic arithmetic that drives private sector insurance higher
also affects Medicare. But unlike the private sector, Medicare doesn't
screen out patients for pre-existing conditions. Quite to the contrary,
Medicare covers those most expensive to cover; the elderly.
In fact, our current fragmented privatized health care insurance industry
helps drive up Medicare costs. How? By not having any real incentive
to provide proactive treatments for later-in-life illnesses since
those people will be on Medicare when these illnesses crop up. So
it's Medicare who will have to foot the bill, not the private insurer.
In fact, this fragmented health care system places so much of a burden
on public plans like Medicare that we already pay more in taxes alone
for health care than countries with public plans (don't
believe me? Fine, click here.).
These increased costs get us less coverage for our money. Why you
ask? Private health insurance companies spend a lot of money researching
prospective customers, checking into their medical history and habits
to figure out how much to charge them for premiums or whether or not
to cover them at all. It also has other costs, like marketing/advertising,
dividend payouts, and overpaid CEOs/execs, lobbying politicians to
not pass any health care bill which might threaten their profit margins,
scare ads that misinform the public about such a bill, in addition
to maintaining profit margins. These costs are passed onto us by way
of higher premiums and deductibles. In other words, we pay those costs,
and these are costs that would not exist in a public plan. So the
net effect; we pay more and get less health care than other industrialized
countries (who do have universal health care).
Runaway
health care costs were #1! (health care spending as a percentage
of GDP)
And according to the National Health Expenditure Report, private
health insurance costs have risen at a faster rate than public health
insurance (ie. Medicare, Medicaid). Read
the entire PDF here. Ok fine, don't read it. I know I know. We
Americans tend to have the attention span of a football (thanks a
lot Twitter, Tivo, text messaging, etc). At least look at snapshot
of the report that shows the increases in both Medicare and private
health insurance and note which one has risen more! And remember this
when the Glenn Becks of the world complain about "inefficient
governmen bureaucracyt," because the private sector, in cases
like this, are loaded with their own inefficient bureaucracy.
See Also:
Not Passing Health
Reform isn't Free
Opponents of Obamas Health Care reform are fond of portraying the proposed bills as too expensive, often with the assumption that not passing them is free. The problem here is that doing
nothing would be more expensive than the costs of the proposed bills. Here is an example of how Fox News Chris Wallace took the CBOs projections out of context to give a false impression of the net costs
of the bill.
See Also:
The GOP's Fake Solutions
Wedged between not wanting to accept anything that involves more government/public infrastructure and not wanting to be seen as the party thats for staying the course on health care,
the GOP continually insists on a number of alleged solutions they claim will lower health care costs and extend coverage to currently uninsured or underinsured Americans. Actual studies from non-partisan
sources show these solutions are either unrealistic or would bring little/no savings or added coverage in health care.
Some of these solutions sound great in sound bytes, but these arent
realistic methods for seriously reducing costs and expanding coverage
on their own (at best, they chip away from the edges). They are shoot-from-the-hip
suggestions that sound good and appeal to our common sense. But
the subject of health care is not intuitive to us. Its not subject
to the usual laws of supply and demand. So as good as some of these
solutions sound upfront, in practice, they are not very efficient
or practical.
See Also:
Tort Reform
Selling Health Insurance Across State Lines
Health Savings Accounts
Reaganomics Demolished
The Middle Class:
It goes like this: Make the middle class think their
tax money is going to welfare queens and don't let them know that
most social
spending goes to the middle class in the form of Medicare and Social
Security. This way, in the name of "small government," lower taxes
on the most wealthy, bust up unions, and let the country's wealth
coagulate to the top as unions have less and less ability to ensure
workers are getting a fare share of the pie. As middle class jobs
pay less and less for the cost of living, continually trick them into
thinking that taxes (not the fact that the rich are soaking
up a bigger and bigger slice of the pie) are what's eating up their
ability to get by. Also, as less tax revenue is collected, the deficit
is racked up because important programs are paid for through borrowing.
This way, you can then scare the middle class into thinking that an
"entitlement mentality" and "bloated government "are
eating up the deficit (for an advanced country, our tax rates are
actually quite low).
Note the how much less the rich pay in taxes now when conservative
"deficit hawks" pretend that raising taxes on the upper
income earners is not an option for paying the deficit down. Remember,
the Post WWII/golden era conservatives pretend to long for, was an
era of much higher taxation on the rich, and more social distribution.
It's the "liberals" who want those days back. Note the irony
of the conservative/liberal labels.
Paul Krugman on the Middle Class
See Also:
Paul Krugman is the Man!
Watch this video where Nobel
Prize winner Paul Krugman explains the creation and virtual extinction
of the middle class here. If you want more than this cliff notes version,
buy his book, The
Conscience of a Liberal.
