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Doing the wrong thing to find out it is wrong
© 2008 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” – P.J. O’Rourke, 1993.
Regardless of the winner in the presidential election, it is likely Americans will soon be forced into nationalized health care. It is all that is left for the left to give Americans for their votes. Many candidates talk about “free” cradle-to-grave health care as an American right.
If we get in the business of providing free health care, what will it cost? A better question is: Can our government sustain these programs? For a while, perhaps, but that is not the problem.
Getting everyone in a government-controlled health care system has a nice ring to many. Unfortunately, I suspect it will be like when in 1859 Thomas Austin, a wealthy Australian landowner, wanted something from the old country to hunt so he imported twenty-four English wild rabbits and released them. The devastating effect on
It appears we Americans will have to do the wrong thing so we will realize it is wrong and finally get back to doing the right things. If we collectively were smarter, we could learn from the suffering of people in other countries, but this hot stove is irresistible to us so we have to burn ourselves to know the truth. Worse, we will have to spend a lot of money to have a problem.
Most medical research in the world is done in capitalistic
Concerns about socialized health care
My concern with socialized health care is two-fold. First, the enterprise of health care is made up of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and researchers who voluntarily go into those fields. It is not easy for them in their chosen fields even now. What will happen when all of those newly hired government bureaucrats start telling these health professionals what to do? Quite possibly these professionals may quit and the potential next generation may not enter those fields.
In other socialized-medicine countries, health professionals are going into other fields and leaving a medical gap. Health care is an enterprise made up of volunteers who can quit.
Second, Americans already use insurance improperly. Insurance is designed so that you do not lose that which will be devastating to lose. It is not something to save 10 bucks here and there. You have insurance so that if you have to spend a week in intensive care you don’t have to sell your dog. Socialized medicine exacerbates this economic trend to stifle the effect of competition on the cost of goods and services.
What increases prices is the co-pay, because customers attend to the cost of the co-pay and do not comparison-shop the cost of treatment. If you have the same co-pay for a general practitioner as a specialist, what the heck, go to the specialist, eh?
Further, insurance companies use cost-containment, a fancy word for reducing what you expend in health care dollars. The existing cost-containment measures are already obnoxious. When the government does it on a grand scale, there will be widespread discontent.
It is easy to assume that people will only use health care when it is absolutely necessary, but that is not the observed practice of those who do not pay for their doctor visits. When health care is “free” there is nothing to constrain use. The government cannot pay for everyone to use it as people do when there is no cost. So the government will decide if you should be treated.
In
How to lower health care costs
Want to lower health care costs? The solution is the same for those who want to lower gasoline prices. Increase supply. Using incentives to get people to go into those fields, double the current number so that doctors are looking for patients rather than patients trying to get doctors to see them. And, tort reform is necessary so that health treatment costs are not about lawsuits.
How do we deal with those who cannot afford or choose not to have insurance? That is as troublesome as the issue of obesity and smoking. People who are economically challenged are equal to those who cannot lose weight and those who cannot quit smoking. Each has options, which others think will set them right, but they, themselves, must do the heavy lifting.
People can be helped to pay for health care without forcing government-controlled health care on us all. We will learn the folly of this action, eventually. Let’s get this political solution over with as quickly as possible so we can get back to what works best, the free market.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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As usual, Michael is mixing apples and oranges. The current health care crisis is not about what level of medical care is available for those who can afford it. The crisis is about access to the 45 MILLION Americans who cannot. Sure, the system works fine for some. WHO CAN AFFORD IT. Mr. Swickard considers health care like a used car lot. The more cars on the lot the cheaper the prices. This isn’t the case for health care and never has been. Running a special on open-heart surgery will not draw more folks to the OR and thus lower prices as Mr.Swickard’s “free-market” model would suggest. For-profit hospitals like the two in Las Cruces will not be hiring more trained health care workers if the community is filled with people who cannot pay. Even at $1.00 per hour a hospital would not hire a single staff if there were no insurers to pay. That is the problem. The payor. Not the provider. We, as a nation, have allowed the payors (insurance companies, HMOs, etc.) to determine who has access to the healthcare providers we all pay for. Every time a new hospital opens up and gets tax deferments we all have payed for the hospital. Yet, under the current system only those covered by insurances get to access the services. The gap between those who can pay and those who the government provides for via Medicare, Medicaid, indigent funds etc is about 45million Americans. A national health care insurance would allow those folks who help pay for the hospitals to actually go and get care. Yet, there are still those apples and oranges commentators like Michael who believe shutting 45 million fellow Americans out of what they are paying for is okey-dokey.
Bernie
My health insurance for a (healthy!) family of 3 is currently over $13,000 per year.
Even the ‘failed’ Massachusetts plan has managed to insure 300,000 people for about $2100 each.
For-profit insurance companies are sucking 20-30% out of the system while making health care LESS accessible; whereas Medicare uses about 3% for overhead.
And – big pharma joins in to rip us all off regularly. Read this:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/07/AR2008020701336.html
And Mr Swickard wants us to believe the ‘free market works best’ !?
The extreme failure of the US to contain medical costs results from our unique, pervasive commercialization.
” Using incentives to get people to go into those fields, “
If making a few hundred thousand a year isn’t an incentive, what is?
Two questions-
1) How do you define a “medical gap”? The stats I looked up show ~3 doctors per 1,000 population in Sweden and France, ~2.4 in Canada, UK and the US. In Sweden in particular, the number of doctors and specialists has grown consistently since 1950.
Sources:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/53/12/38976551.pdf
http://www.slf.se/upload/L%C3%A4karfakta_2005_eng_webb.pdf
2) How can you claim increasing supply of healthcare providers and technology decrease healthcare prices when countries which have less physicians per capita (Japan) and countries which have more physicians per capita (Sweden, France) both spend less on healthcare per capita and as a percentage of GDP than the US, with higher quality?
This is not to say “Yay Sweden! Boo USA!”, but rather to ask, “If all these other countries can do it, why can’t the world superpower do it?”
Unfortunately the pied-pipers’ siren is too strong a lure for those who want/demand free lunches and refuse to contemplate the consequences of their insatiable want it now appetites.
We have had thousands of years to learn the harsh lessons regarding the freebies that parasitic Kings and Queens constantly offer. But, sadly many of us continue wanting the fruits of other’s labor or trading freedoms for theoretical security.
All humans are subjected to and have succumbed to temptations, but we are supposed to learn from our mistakes. Yet, despite being educated we still cannot recognize the difference between theft and integrity.
Regardless of what do-gooders claim – taxes are at the root of all problems relating to any form of poverty. Eliminate taxes and prosperity will blossom, which will allow anyone access to the always expensive forms of insurance, whether it be for the car, home, or health. Trouble is – there are tooooo many dependent upon the various forms of theft.
Obtaining real health insurance will be painful because it will require incremental surgeries that slash away the diseased bureaucratic infestations that now threaten civilization.
The present healthcare system is not working. Not only is it unbelievably expensive, but the insurance companies are corrupt to the core. Do away with them, I say. Many Americans, including myself, are eagerly awaiting socialized medicine, and will support any politicians who will work to make it happen.
I do, however, agree with Swikard that we need a lot more doctors. The present system is an insult all around.