What’s really wrong with health care

June 3, 2013

By John Seiler

What’s really wrong with health care? A New York Times article showed some of it. Read it and see if you see much, if any, patient involvement in decisions. Here’s are some key sections:

“Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

“Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray for allergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy….

“The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.”

The Times quotes Dr. David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund and a former adviser to President Obama. Blumenthal said, “In the U.S., we like to consider health care a free market. But it is a very weird market, riddled with market failures.”

Actually, it isn’t a “free market” system at all, but a combination of Crony Capitalism and socialism. As the article indicates if you read it carefully, the patient has no real say on price. Instead, it’s an agreement among Big Pharma, Big Hospital, Big Insurance, Big Specialists and Big Government. They collude to drive up costs and rip us off.

Dr. Ron Paul, the obstetrician and former U.S. congressman, has recounted how things worked in the early 1960s when he first began practicing medicine, just before the massive increase in government control of medicine with LBJ’s Medicare/Medicaid schemes of the mid-1960s, and Nixon pushing on us HMOs in the early 1970s.

As late as the early 1960s, most people didn’t have health insurance. People instead shopped for doctors by both price and quality, and could haggle with the doctors on price. A serious illness was paid for from savings, and you could save a lot easier when you weren’t paying high medical insurance premiums every month. Those who couldn’t pay, including the poor, were cared for by charity; hospitals allowed in the poor, and doctors provided several hours of charity service a week at reduced fees. At that time, America had by far the best medical care in the world.

Now, it’s just another crummy, American Crony Capitalist-socialist government ripoff. We’re lucky any quality at all remains in it. But Obamacare should take care of that.