People love free stuff. Offer a free meal and you will draw a crowd. Free gifts fill the store with non-paying customers. We love to get something for nothing.
For over a decade there have been reports of the exponentialing growing cost of medicare and the need to reign in costs. The solution: expand the program by at least 30 million people! The cost projections done in the ’60′s proved to be wrong by a factor of 100. That is the true cost 20 years down the line was 100 times more than projected. With some creative math, we are told that the current health proposal will cost $1 trillion, an amount that we don’t appear to have. In reality it will cost more. Who knows how much more? $2 trillion? $10 trillion? $100 trillion?
Medicare has been increasing well above the cost of inflation since it began. The rhetoric indicates that there will be savings through better preventive care, decreased errors due to investment in electronic records, and price controls.
Preventive care: I live in a rural community. The people or largely poorly educated and overweight. We have many smokers. Even with free care, many of them would not go to the doctor for health maintenance. If they did, there is no guarantee they would do what they were advised to do. Eat less, exercise more, quit smoking, take medication for your hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol… Decreased cost (for the particapant) will only go a little way toward improving the health of the nation.
Errors: A computer is a tool dependent on the human operator. Electronic medical records (EMR) will not eliminate human error. Having used EMR at the hospital and now at a private clinic, I don’t think it will reduce cost or errors one bit. All of the data is entered by people. It is just as easy to click the wrong box as it is to pull the wrong vial off the pharmacy shelf. EMR will make it easier for government bureaucrats to measure compliance with government edicts and deny payment for not complying.
Price controls don’t work. Never have, never will. Efficient pricing of capitalist markets allocates resources rationally. Health czars don’t. They assign benefits to the cause du jour, perceived areas of need, and to friends who enrich themselves with our tax dollars and pay the favor back with campaign contributions.
The physical and financial health of the nation are about to get worse. We need reform that can help contain cost and improve health. Tort reform, insurance reform, tiered care. Repeal EMTALA. Make people pay something for their care. Until people take responsibility for themselves–their health and welfare–cost will continue to soar.
