Friday, June 05, 2009

Getting Health Care Reform Wrong

I have said it before; what Obama and Congress are doing is tinkering with health insurance regulations and calling it health care reform. It is about as similar to health care reform as I am to Jupiter, and its benefit to the American people is almost entirely illusion. Consider this from Reuters,

Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that health care reform is on the wrong track.

More than 75% of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.

(emphasis mine) You do not fix what is not working by doing more of it.

Saying whether or not the "for profit model" of health insurance "works" depends on how you define the term. We have a health plan that is flexible and has good coverage, and when I am not in contention with the insurance company over payment, I am in contention with a provider who has billed the insurance company incorrectly, or is billing me for something the insurance has already paid. I'm one of the lucky ones, because copays and deductibles have not bankrupted us.

This model of health insurance certainly "works" for those who profit from it, and it will "work" for them even better when the government requires more people to pay into it, as is their present proposal for "reform."

Health care reform does not mean expanding and enriching the health insurance industry. It means redesigning to system to actually deliver health care to our people in a manner that does not financially ruin them, as the rest of the industrialized world already does.

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