President Obama is eager to give us healthcare but I’m not sure how and I don’t think he is either. It’s not just a matter of breaking open the cookie jar and letting everybody have all they want.
He has talked a lot about “whats” but not as much about
“hows.” That’s the hard part. It’s easy
to make a list of things that would be good to give people. But nobody wants to answer the three big,
ugly questions: 1. Who’s going to pay for those who don’t pay? 2. Who’s going to pay for medical research
and development of new drugs and 3. How
much are we going to spend to keep those at the end of life going for a few
more days or months?
I’ve seen smiling people on TV, both commentators as well as “stakeholders” in this issue. They are even saying that they need to get costs down. I haven’t heard them say how.
I’m reading now that the annual cost for health insurance
for a family is about $15,000. But
that’s for insurance, not the cost of health care. Why?
Because hospitals charge people with insurance to pay for at least some
of those who get care and don’t pay. Like
any business, if you don’t find a way to charge all of your costs to customers,
you will eventually run out of money and go out of business.
It costs 100’s of millions to develop new drugs, and then they might not work or might not be approved so the money is lost. Who will fund this risk? Who will decide what to work on? The government? Some committee? Will the government control the process and bar lawsuits in case of someone having a bad reaction to a medication. If you picked a million people out of the phone book and gave them aspirin or penicillin, a few would have a negative reaction.
I see industry representatives, patient’s rights advocates and all sorts of people getting into the debate. But we need a hard, rational analysis of this issue. There need to be Certified Public Accountants digging through the costs in this industry to see what is going on and where the money goes. It’s just like in medicine, if you don’t get all the facts and assess them rationally, you aren’t going to come up with an effective remedy.
Nobody knows the answers to this yet but if we don’t go down the right path, we will never find it. It has to be based on careful, deliberate analysis.
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