Opening Thoughts
What does it really mean to “Reform Healthcare” in the United States? If you asked 1000 people, you would likely get 1000 different answers. Each individual, or someone close to them, has had their own unique experience of failure in the current system. The stories may be as commonplace as waiting six hours to be seen by a physician in Emergency while doubled over with abdominal pain, or as quietly sad as an Alzheimer’s patient experiencing a slow uncomfortable end over many months while bankruptcy swallows their family.
In the last few days and over the last twenty years or so, we have been talking about tweaking our existing approach to healthcare to try to overcome its current deficiencies. This would result in keeping insurance as the basis for reform. Even President Obama has been pitching the implementation of yet another insurance plan to increase competition. He has also indicated that this new insurance would include improved management of the process of obtaining healthcare and correct for many of the existing issues.
However, all the last twenty years of debate over Healthcare Reform has consistently missed one small fact:
You can insure against a traffic accident or a building burning down as they are events that are not guaranteed to occur. However, you cannot insure against old age taking a life. Life has determined, unequivocally, that we will, one day, expire in some, as yet, undeterminable way.
As the population of the United States ages and our youth, under the current system, becomes less and less healthy with the earlier onsets of preventable diseases such as obesity and juvenile Diabetes, Insurance, because it is a business, will continue to cleanout the costly in favor of the profitable. It would also be foolish not to believe, that in a future time of economic crisis, that cost cutting measures would also be applied to a government run insurance program.
Other factors to consider are some of the obvious ones, and some unspoken ones thrown around in this debate to date.
- Healthcare insurance costs are quickly climbing to $1 out of $5 earned to $1 out of $3.
- Time spent managing healthcare providers and the insurance companies have a greater impact than just calculable hours of lost work on the productivity of all around the afflicted.
- One in three personal bankruptcies is a direct result of the failure of the current healthcare system.
- A healthy people are a productive people.
Changing Thoughts
What has to happen here is a reformation of a way of thinking, first, then, and only then, a reformation of the system could be successful.
It is easy to understand that this approach does not cover those times of accidental death; when injuries sustained in a vehicular accident result in a trip to the hospital and, after some provisioning of care, still results in death. Just like the medical profession has its Hippocratic Oath as governance, we, as a people, should care enough about our community to cover the small discrepancies for the good of the many.
Additionally, the keywords in the above scenario are “accidental death” and “vehicular accident”. Many States in our Union are “No Fault” States that essential say no one can be held accountable, and consequently learn from their mistakes that resulted in vehicular accidents. This, as is healthcare today, is about protecting Insurance companies and not the driving population. If you haven’t seen it already, the pervasive theme here is Insurance companies have, in general, received more protection under the law and is considered the driving force for protection against the unknown.
But, wait a minute, human health is based on science; human biology and genetics are well studied and the number of treatable, or manageable health issues far outweighs the untreatable or unmanageable. With some hard work, based on statistics that the Insurance industry and Federal and State governments have in mass quantities, we could easily map out a median healthcare expense of a life in this country. We know that the Insurance companies can do this already, otherwise, they would all be out of business for poor “Risk Management”. However, the Insurance companies need to follow through and add in positive change factors such as controlling diet to reduce or eliminate the onset of Type-II Diabetes and provide incentives to other industries and the citizenry to change in support. Sadly, they are Insurance companies; in the business of taking in premiums and avoiding payouts for the sake of improving profits.
Therefore, the only entity with the broad reach to build the kind of system that reaches across multiple industries for the sake of its people is the Federal Government. It is the only place that can proportionally take in revenue from all of its customers (“we the people”) and coordinate the distribution of funds to (just to name a few):
- Healthcare provisioning.
- Paying for quality food for school lunchrooms instead of “fast-food”.
- A “bike to work day” fuel tax credit (just brainstorming, but a true bonus here, keeps some carbon out of the air instead of buying carbon credits).
- Setting up truly comfortable “thank you for your contribution” end-of-life care facilities, free for those in clinical need.
- Funding research to eliminate or drastically control massively expensive diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, or preventable cancers.
Closing Thoughts
Wouldn’t it be a great thing to have a government that spends less time plugging legal loopholes (or creating them for special interests) and focusing on management of punishment for mistakes and errors, but instead concentrate on creating legislation that improves our quality of life and overall health, helps us become more productive, and rewards us for doing the things that are good for our nation and, consequently, the global community. After all, it is the constitutional role of the Federal Government to provide for the defense of its nation and its people. This should, by any measure, include defense against disease, poverty, financial ruin and accidental death.
If you take away anything from all of this, let it be the thought of changing the way of thinking and focusing on can rather thancannot. If we stop and do this for a moment then start asking the questions of how we can help the government create a Healthcare Service industry in replacement of a Healthcare Insurance industry, when we reach our last days, we just might feel thanked and appreciated rather than neglected and forgotten.
