Health care isn’t the problem

Forgive me if my examples come from Minnesota – it’s the place I know the best.

In a country with the Mayo Clinic, great public hospitals that can handle everything from traumas to diabetes such as the Hennepin County Medical Center, top-flight academic facilites such as the University of Minnesota Medical School training doctors, and innovative clinics such as the Twin Cities Spine Center, where practitioners work tirelessly to deliver the best possible service to every patient that comes through their doors, our problem isn’t health care.

As Minnesota’s largest safety net hospital, Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC), is a nationally recognized level 1 trauma center, a statewide resource, but they’re facing layoffs and budget cuts. HCMC lost $7 million in state funding last year due to a reduction in rates of payment for care and rebasing delays approved during the 2008 legislative session. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s “unallotment” in December resulted in the loss of another $12 million in state funding. The result: elimination of 75 to 100 full-time equivalent positions by the end of June and the decision that all managers, administrators, and supervisors must take two days off without pay in 2009. The problem isn’t health care, it’s finding leadership willing to address the outrageously high costs when so much of the money goes to non-medical expenses.

Our challenge is insuring that everybody in this country has access to quality health care, including the physicians of their choice, when they need it at a price they can afford. Our health insurance industry is broken. It’s unsustainable for businesses to pay for spiraling costs that have increased at triple the rate of inflation for 30 years, and if businesses can’t afford it neither can private individuals.

Presently, 31% of health care premiums end up paying for administrative overhead – costs include advertising, exorbitant CEO salaries, and expensive lobbyists working to insure Congress leaves the insurance industry profits alone.

You may argue that a public insurance system competes with private industry to their detriment – but I think it’s very telling that CEOs earning tens of millions of dollars per year fear competition.  Isn’t competition what our free market is all about?

Competition is supposed to bring prices down, that’s precisely the reason capitalism works.  Part of the problem is there’s no real competition going on when you don’t have real choices obtaining health care, and changing jobs may bankrupt you because your new coverage won’t deal with a “pre-existing condition.”  A lot of the cost-control problem is there’s presently no incentive for big insurance companies to manage the costs of health care, only their costs of operation – which they do by insuring the healthiest, and denying and/or changing coverage whimsically when bureaucrats decide to countermand decisions made by highly trained medical professionals.

“…what we’ve seen is that the private healthcare insurers do not know how to deliver an efficient way.”

World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz

Access to quality, affordable health insurance regardless of pre-existing conditions is a must in the 21st century. Industry has worked only for their own profit, exactly what any private business is supposed to do. It’s time for our leaders to step in and set up a system that shows private industry how to deliver modern treatment with acceptable, reasonable overhead margins – even if insurers have to compete in a free market fashion to do so.

Tell your elected representatives in Washington to put our interests in front of special interests.

digg this story!