It’s The System, Not The Care: There is a furor in political and business circles about the health care system in the USA today. Politicos want the government to take over the providing of health care coverage in the name of “fairness,” but has the government ever really run anything without increasing the costs beyond belief? No. All you have to do is look at how the Congress has misused and abused the Social Security System, Medicare and the banking industry to understand that allowing Congress to regulate and manage one-sixth of the US economy would create an even bigger disaster than the present system is deemed to be.
In a recent Newswire Special Report, “Dying to Make a Profit,” authors Chris Ryan and Charles St-Onge state that the problem with health care in the USA is the fault of the independent insurance companies who are attempting to “serve two masters;” their policy holders and their stockholders. They make the valid point that insurance companies, like banks, have a fiduciary responsibility to their policy holders; that is, they have been entrusted with more than providing a product, but with managing the policy holders’ investment with their best interests in mind. The insurers also have a financial responsibility to their stockholders; to make a profit, a return-on-investment.
What Ryan and St-Onge fail to properly define is that there is a difference between “health care” and “health care coverage” and their essay is addressing the latter. There is nothing wrong with the quality of healthcare in the USA, as is evidenced by the numbers of people crossing our borders to obtain the healthcare they cannot get in their socialized medicine systems. But, there is a problem with our healthcare insurance coverage. Also, after making a valid point with their essay, they fail to offer any options. A wise man once said, “Don’t criticize unless you can offer an alternative to what you are criticizing.”
The reforms that are needed to correct the problems with the health care system have to do with changing the insurance coverage system and making major changes to the mass tort legal system. The present medical coverage system encourages over-diagnosis, over-treatment over-medication and fraud. The legal system mandates that doctors protect themselves from malpractice suits by over-testing patients and obtaining very expensive malpractice insurance coverage, both of which are responsible for the huge cost of the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. Many of the problems with the healthcare system can be traced directly to insurance companies and mass tort lawyers. A Federally run program is not the answer to either of these.