Health Care
Posted: 31 July 2009 at 00:54:27
Like many Americans these past few weeks, I've been paying attention to the health care debate like never before. I'm a conservative, libertarian, and a constitutionalist, so I'm far from being in favor of the federal government being involved in health care. That being said, there has been a lot of interesting information published about the history of health care and different arguments for and against single-payer plans, public options, and government mandates.
The Washington Post has published an excellent article about the cost of healthcare. Specifically, they look at the cost of treating acute myocardial infarction (heart attacks) over the last 40-50 years.
In the 1960s, the chance of dying in the days immediately after a heart attack was 30 to 40 percent. In 1975, it was 27 percent. In 1984, it was 19 percent. In 1994, it was about 10 percent. Today, it's about 6 percent.
That's good news for people who may be facing heart attacks later on in life. New and better drugs, new surgical procedures, and more widespread access to defibrillator equipment has all made the deadly heart attack a lot less deadly. But we're at a point where shaving another percentage point or half a percentage point off that six-percent statistic costs a huge amount of money.
It's also interesting to note that if and when you have a heart attack, doctors automatically use the best techniques at their disposal to keep you alive and healthy. The result of using these techniques is a large medical bill that you and/or your insurance company are liable to pay.
There are lots of theories as to why healthcare costs have become so large. Here are a few of them I'm aware of:
As explained in the Washington Post article, better procedures have higher costs.
Many doctors are faced with exorbitant insurance fees because of out of control malpractice suits.
Pharmaceutical companies are greedy and evil and charge outrageous prices for drugs.
Insurance companies are greedy, uncompassionate, evil, etc. and force doctors to charge much more than they ordinarily would in order to get paid a decent amount for services.
Government-provided services like Medicare are a burden to the overall healthcare system and the costs must be made up from non-Medicare customers.
Government and/or insurance paperwork represents a significant burden and overhead to industry.
What isn't true?
Proponents of today's healthcare reform legislation often point to the approximately 40 million people who are, at any one time, without health insurance. They say something need to be done for these people and that's why we need reform.
First of all, several studies have suggested that federal healthcare reform isn't going to eliminate those 40 million people form the rolls of the uninsured. Only a portion of them would be covered. That represents a huge federal investment (i.e. taxpayer dollars that we're apparently swimming in) for not much return. That's what I call a bad investment.
Secondly, many of these uninsured choose to be uninsured or are between jobs.
If you have an emergency and need medical treatment, no hospital is going to deny you care if you're uninsured. In addition, they're probably still going to give you the best care possible (the most expensive care).
Aren't we entitled to great healthcare?
In an article written for Newsweek, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) makes his impassioned argument for healthcare reform. He has several personal experiences he draws from in his article such as his current fight against a brain tumor, his son's bone cancer, and treatment of injuries he received in a plane crash in 1964.