The Health Care solution

The Friday, July 17 issue of the Cape Cod Times letters page contained a number of good pieces on the healthcare issue currently before Congress.

The “My View” argument was essentially that if you want the “very best” you have to expect to pay for it. It is a classical insurance industries scare tactic that they know resonates with uninformed people.

The MD’s letter is more to the point. The multiplicity of insurance plans , “approved” pharmaceuticals, exclusions, etc. make it unnecessarily complex for providers. The fact is, the administrative cost overburden does not does provide Health Care but rather impedes it.

As another writer states, the Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and postal service’s are dependable and efficient. A single payer (governmental) healthcare program is in the same category .

Naturally the question arises: how do we pay for it? In spite of all the gobbledygook and hysteria over increased taxes the net cost would be far less than is currently wasted on exorbitant administrative salaries and campus like expanses of insurance companies.

Employers would be relieved of onerous insurance premiums. Yes, they’d pay more in taxes but that would be a fraction of their current health insurance premiums.

There are many modifications needed to the present Health Care non-system. Preventive care and increased personal responsibility in lifestyle is perhaps the most significant.

Some medical hype has been greatly oversold. There are many hardworking physicians, many are over worked , and they do a heroic job attempting to cope, however people have been conditioned to depend on doctors for the most trivial occurrences.75% of complaints are self limiting, perhaps up to 20% more can be handled by Physician assistants, (P A’s, specially trained nurses). Too many MDs go into specialties because the money is far better there. Those “specialists” are arguably way overpaid. This has come about largely due to insurance payment methods. Over the past 50 years fees have been regularly ratcheted up well beyond the inflation rate.

The current discussion of Health Care and his costs should put all the above on the table and let the light of objective evaluation shine on it. It is an epochal opportunity to correct a problem that has grown through neglect, and manipulative exploitation.

The single-payer solution would go far to ameliorate the situation.