Nationalized Healthcare Part 1

This is the first in a two part series on healthcare reform.

You are hearing people screaming (me included) about national healthcare and going down the slippery slope of socialized medicine. A lot of people are quite frankly indifferent about the whole thing. Maybe that’s because you don’t really understand the concept. You also don’t realize that at some point in your life, your healthcare and how it is handled is going to be very important to you.

Right now the government controls, through Medicare and Medicaid, between 40 and 50% of all medical dollars spent. That is very significant, and growing. The Baby Boomers are starting to become eligible for Social Security and will soon be eligible for Medicare. That generation comprises approximately 77 million people. There are only a little over 300 million people in the country as a whole. Think about those numbers for a minute because they are very important. You are talking about a massive number of people already in a government run system. So why can’t the government implement their cost reductions and improvements on their existing system? After all they have a lot of leverage with the number of people and money that they manage.

What they are not telling you is that Medicare and Medicaid are number one, a HUGE, CRUSHING financial nightmare that is right around the corner, and that they are already driving up your healthcare costs. Medicare/aid sets rates that they will pay doctors for services. Those rates are naturally lower than the doctors would like them to be; occasionally they are even lower than the doctors can afford them to be. If a doctor is not getting properly reimbursed for services from half of his patients, what do you think he has to do to the other half to maintain a profit? Raise rates. Ask more from private insurance companies and individuals who on their own make up a small percentage of his clients.

It’s a similar story for hospitals, but they get an extra whammy thrown in. Hospitals are required to treat patients that come into the emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay and regardless of their citizenship. Now don’t get me wrong, if an illegal alien is involved in a car accident and seriously injured, I really hope that a hospital would administer care to the patient. The fact that they are in the country illegally in the first place is what I have a problem with, but the impact on private industries from the federal government NOT enforcing our boarders is a separate issue. In any case, these emergency room cases cost hospitals money.

The point is that anytime someone doesn’t pay, or under-pays, the difference doesn’t just dissolve into thin air. That money has to be made up somewhere and it is from the people that either have insurance, or are actually paying for their service out of their own pockets.

Nothing is free. Someone pays for it.

Well, then why isn’t the government taking it over the best solution?

The best way to answer that question is with a question, or maybe a series of them.

If the incentives for something decrease, then does it become more popular or less popular? Obviously less.

If college and medical school tuition is steadily on the rise, are people going to be willing to go HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars in the hole to get jobs that pay less and less? I wouldn’t.

Are you going to pay the extra money and spend the additional years of time to become a specialist? You know, an oncologist, pediatric neurologist, cardiac surgeon… The answer in the countries that have already tried this is a resounding NO. They have fewer doctors, fewer specialists, and LONGER wait times. That’s why Canadians who need a specialist often come to the US. Sometimes they are even sent here BY THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT.

So you go this route. People hear that wait times are up and they start to feel a little sick. What’s the first thing they do? Run to the doctor or at least make an appointment. Before they would have waited and tried a couple of things, but now they are worried that they won’t be able to get in if they don’t make an appointment immediately.

So now you have fewer doctors, fewer specialists, and more people going to the doctor when they could have/would have stayed home. Wait times for appointments can be months long. People literally start suffering and even dying on the waiting list. What would have been treatable cancer is now terminal. What would have been managed glaucoma now means blindness.

Understandably people get upset and they start complaining to their elected officials, after all, they are the ones who control the system. So now they create a health review panel to limit the number of things that are covered by the system since costs are skyrocketing and people are complaining. Now they ask people to start self medicating for certain conditions. Sure, they won’t be as comfortable as they would have been with appropriate care and an expensive prescription, but it costs less and frees up physicians.

All the while people who are in school and considering going into medicine look at the mess and the limited benefit to them and they decide to become lawyers instead. Medicine just isn’t worth it.

So the problem continues to build.

These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. People in the UK and Canada go through this every day. Cancer patients who reach certain stages or who have certain types aren’t treated because the chances of survival are too low and the cost too high. The elderly are denied services that could drastically improve their quality of life, like certain medicines or pacemakers, because they are too old and the money wouldn’t serve the ‘greater good’. Those who suffer are those who need care the most but are deemed the least valuable to society.

For a country that values the individual and the beauty of human life, this is the wrong direction.