by Morrow Hall

Created on: June 11, 2009

Let's start with the cost. I have heard wildly different figures, but it's clear government bureaucracy does a lot better than the for-profit health insurance industry. The figures for administration I have heard are all below 5% for Medicare and Medicaid, and the health insurance cost is somewhere between 18% and 30%.

Now, what are we getting from the health insurance companies? It seems their primary function is to say "no." No, you cannot have this life-saving treatment. No, we won't cover treatment of this illness. No. No. No.

I don't want health insurance. I want health care. Socialized medicine? You bet. That's what I want.

Sen. Thune was on the floor yesterday (6-10-09) repeating the old mantra that U.S. health care is the "best in the world." That's only true for those who can pay for it. We spend more money, cover a smaller percentage of our citizens, and have worse health than many other countries. A couple of decades ago we had a huge expansion of the health insurance industry. Before that, the stereotypical medical doctor drove around with a bumper sticker that read "My other car is also a Beemer."

Now it's the stereotypical health insurance executive who sports the bumper sticker. Can anyone explain to me the benefit we receive by paying these companies 18% or more of our health care dollars? Any benefit?

The Republicans keep warning that if we have a government-run system "bureaucrats will be making decisions that should be made between a patient and his doctor." Well, I'd rather have a bureaucrat, enforcing laws and regulations hammered out in the public forum by our elected representatives, than a health insurance CEO with a trillion-dollar salary between me and my doctor.

Harry and Louise are changing their minds, too. There is a great deal of momentum for single-payer health care. Can you imagine how much easier it would be to access such a system? We'd have recourse, too, through our representative democracy, for the kind of arbitrary decisions we cannot fight under the current system.

Under an ideal system, every citizen would visit a doctor at least annually. Emerging problems would be dealt with before they become life-threatening (and much more expensive). The government would pay the doctor and we would pay the government.

Would there be problems? Of course. There would be hypochondriacs who abused the system. Some doctors would bill the government for things they didn't actually do. We would have to deal with these problems and many more, but again, they would be dealt with in the open forum, and the resulting actions could be changed if they were inadequate.

The U.S. government does a pretty good job running the Defense Department and the Social Security system. I think it would do just fine running the country's health care system. Most important, if it didn't, we could fix it. We have no hope of fixing the HMOs and MCOs.

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