E Pluribus Unum

by shep

Quite obviously, American insurance-industry-run heathcare is a failure teetering on collapse. It is completely unavailable to nearly one-sixth of the population and only tentatively available to everyone else, except for the wealthy. Employer-paid health insurance, the most accessible form of healthcare for most people, now drives our decisions about who we work for, who in the family works and whether we can afford to change jobs. People are regularly denied access to heathcare, because they are sick.

The system is poorly regulated, either by industry or government. 100,000 people die from medical mistakes in hospitals alone. The average cost for drugs is two to four times higher than in other industrialized countries and also injures and kills many thousands. The real regulator and last recourse for those who are harmed by the actions of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and/or doctors is a widely-reviled tort system that siphons off huge amounts of money (in addition to the huge amounts siphoned-off by insurance companies themselves) that should be being spent on medical care.

Yet, our system is monstrously expensive compared to other industrialized countries. It severely undermines US competitiveness in world markets. As technology and our collective average age continues to advance, it is predicted that more people will be driven from the system, healthcare will have to be (even more) rationed, its cost will bankrupt the government, or all of the above. It also, due to the short-term profit motives of insurance companies, becomes ever more expensive because people don’t have easy access to wellness or preventative primary care that might help them avoid costly disease.

Our market-driven healthcare system is literally killing us. Only those whose thinking is corrupted by simple-minded market ideology remain committed to such a system and only the fact that our elected officials are beholden to the status quo industries’ campaign cash explains why we haven’t abandoned it for a rational alternative. Here are five critical things that we need to fix our current system that a market-based, insurance industry approach can never achieve:

1) Pool risk and cost as broadly as possible, creating the lowest average cost per person for healthcare.

2) Allow for a simple administrative system with a single point of contact, one set of rules and one processing system.

3) Create a level competitive marketplace for all healthcare providers.

4) Allow for an emphasis on cost-saving wellness, preventative and primary care.

5) Give the public-at-large control over the specific features of the healthcare system through their elected representatives.

We will be forced to adopt a government-administered single-payer system of some sort eventually, like every other industrialized nation on earth. The question now is only how much more human suffering and how many more $billions we will waste on the current industry-run system.

Next: what a government-administered single-payer system might look like, including the role for insurance providers (actually, I’ve already given that one away).

(Cross-posted at Queen Of All Evil)

Update: OK, I realize that saying healthcare, “is completely unavailable to nearly one-sixth of the population,” is a bit of hyperbole. What I am talking about is the entire system: primary care, specialists, screening, wellness, etc. If waiting until you're sick enough to wait four to eight hours to be seen in an emergency room and then being sued by the hospital and having your credit destroyed does it for you…