|
Seeking affordable health care coverage |
Bill Horne
October 1st, 2007
|
...free market health care coverage vs. government health care coverage...
Both systems are now in play and both are in need of repair or maybe even a complete overhaul....
|
Folks, food prices are rising rapidly and gas and other energy costs are high and rising. And even though there is a mortgage foreclosure problem, housing costs are still increasing.
In the early 1980s, it took about half of our family income to pay for food, gas and electric, and housing. Now, just 25 years later, it takes about 80 percent of our income to pay for those same family budget items.
The above is important because food, energy, and housing costs are absolutely necessary. So, as these items take more and more of our income, we have had to do away with other important family wants and needs. The most important of these is health care.
The other key to this problem is that ever since the World Trade Organization took over the operation of the worlds business, American companies, to compete with Third World countries, have had to cut costs. Some of this costcutting has come in the form of lower wages and benefits. A key benefit that our middle class families have lost - besides wages and pensions - is employer paid insurance.
The inability to pay for health care by our companies and our families is taking a harsh toll on our society as well as on individual families. We, the richest country the world has ever known, ranked 37th in overall health and 42nd in length of life. The sad part of this is we are more likely to get worse than better.
As our country's health becomes a more and more urgent problem, we are beginning to take sides: free market health care coverage vs. government health care coverage. Single-payer health care is the politically correct term for our government's involvement.
Both systems are now in play and both are in need of repair or maybe even a complete overhaul.
The government Medicare program, for example, is forbidden by federal law from negotiating drug prices. This alone costs the taxpayers double the normal price for prescription drugs.
The private system on the other hand isn't so private as we are led to believe. We taxpayers subsidize the private companies to the tune of about $250 billion a year.
Folks, we are a capitalistic free market country. In most areas, our system works really well. But right now, where health care is concerned, the system is not only not working but it is headed in the wrong direction.
More and more of us, not only do not have health insurance, but cannot afford minimum health care - much less a catastrophe.
It is easy for people who work for famous think tanks to tell us that we should use private insurance and not the government.
They even threaten us by saying that health care paid for by the government is of lower quality.
Let's assume for a moment that government paid health care is of lower quality. That line of thinking is only true if a family had private insurance. If that family had no health insurance and was able to become covered by the government any quality care would be better than nothing.
Is the quality of health care really lower when paid for by the government? Families with private insurance will find that they are restricted to certain doctors and certain hospitals. Is there any possibility that the above restrictions are based on quality? Or is it that the doctors and hospitals that private insurance companies allow their customers to use are the cheapest? The cheapest might just be lower quality.
Recently Gov. Ted Strickland raised the minimum family income level to allow and to qualify more families' children for government health insurance here in Ohio. And immediately, the numbers crunchers jumped on his plan. They complained about the additional costs. They complained that people would drop their private insurance and use the government. They also complained that the governor's numbers were wrong. And they complained that his plan wasn't going to help as many children as he predicted.
It would seem that the naysayers are missing the key points.
No. 1: If some families did drop their health insurance for government insurance, they probably had a good reason. Maybe their private insurance did not allow them to use their favorite doctor. Or maybe they had a child with a pre-existing condition that was not covered by insurance. Maybe they just wanted help with the prohibitive costs of vaccinating their children. This is an item that most private insurance policies do not cover.
No. 2: We are discussing the health of our children here and numbers, particularly dollars, cannot be assigned to the worth of a child.
No. 3: There is a major point that no one seems to be discussing that is going to help thousands and thousands of families. This point is that currently parents are trapped in low-paying jobs. If they move to a higher-paying job, their children will lose their health insurance.
I personally know people who have had to turn down raises because the additional income would cause their children to lose health care coverage. So, the governor's plan will allow those people in low-paying jobs to accept raises and/or move to higher-paying jobs and still have government health insurance cover their children.
A family could gamble and not have health care coverage. But for those families that lose their gamble because of serious injury or illness, they will be trapped, because of the new bankruptcy laws, in poverty, forever.
We need some very brilliant, open-minded people to wrap their brains around this problem and solve it for us.
-----
Bill Horne is a professor of economics at Southern State Community College and a columnist for The Times-Gazette.
|
|
