Fox news reports today: "The White House said Tuesday that some of the anger that Democratic lawmakers have encountered at town hall meetings over the past several days is "manufactured." They proceed to ridicule that notion implying that people are genuinely angry at the politicians' attempts to reform our health care system and to introduce universal health care which we alone do not have in the developed world.
As a private individual, not a liberal, and not a Democrat, I will confirm that from my personal experience I believe there is a concentrated effort behind fueling that anger and organizing those "protesting crowds". Over the weekend I received a pre-recorded phone call inviting me to come to such a meeting and "scaring" me with all the horrible things which would happen should the government succeed in their reform plans. You better believe that it cost somebody some serious money to record the message and call thousands of households. Follow the money, and you will know who organized the protests. Maybe it was financed by the Republican Party - I don't know. But it was some special groups' money which financed it anyway. My guess is that the insurance companies, and possibly the big pharma are behind the finances for such protests.
I hang up on them. As a person who originally came from the Soviet Union, and a person who has been married to a physician for a quarter of a century, I can tell them a lot myself about what the consequences will be. However, I know that the current system is deeply corrupted and inefficient. I do believe we as a nation should be able to make some basic health care guarantees to our citizens. I am not familiar with the details of the government plan - I am sure they will screw up the reform, but what we have now is not sustainable and we have no moral right to perpetuate it. The system we have now is wasteful, and it still limits people's access to health care. Your claims processor at the insurance company who may be a high school dropout has the power to deny the doctor prescribed necessary diagnostic procedure or treatment because that processor is charged with the sacred mission of guarding the bonus size for the insurance company's CEO. Don't kid yourselves! We do not have the best health care system in the world. Don't look at how much money we spend on healthcare. Look at the outcomes of teh treatment. We are far from the top of the industrialized nations in the results of all our very technological treatment. And what is important, too, I do not know a single primary care doctor who wishes their children would become primary care doctors in their turn. Reform or no reform, who are you going to have to treat you?
I will be writing more on the subject.
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Our Health Care system is another economic bubble ready to burst: the reform may manage to deflate this bubble in some sort of a controlled manner. Otherwise it will pop on it's own and that would hurt a lot more!
ReplyDeleteWe currently have no health care system; we have health care chaos One would have to be mad to want to preserve what we now have. Advertisements warning that change will involve a loss of choice are laughable. Anyone with no health insurance cannot even choose to get care, let alone choosing who is going to provide it. Those that can choose often opt to get more care than is necessary or even good for them. There is a maldistribution of care, which is why we have the most expensive healthcare in the world and not much in the way of a healthy population to show for it. What no politician, healthcare or pharmaceutical executive, or organized medical group is willing to openly express is that for there to be a "system", there must be some discipline. That discipline will involve the need to give patients what they need, as opposed to what they want. A lot of responsibility for the current mess involves the American belief that more is better and that one should get whatever one wants. In the world of healthcare, that reasoning frequently leads to ineffective expensive care. A real system will require that healthcare-greedy individuals not be allowed to commit the system to extravagant ineffective care, by veiled threat of legal action against a physician or other provider if not given their way. In the current situation (not system), I, as a physician, will ultimately give into almost any demand for an unnecessary test because I will be hung out to dry if I happen to miss something, having failed to do the test. We will need protection from litigation over adverse outcomes, when standards of care have been met. Currently, vindication of good treatment in the presence of a bad outcome, can only come at the end of a jury trial with a defense verdict. This is long, expensive and soul destroying process, which mostly helps litigation attorneys. Additionally any system will have to pay doctors differently. Spending time with patients in the office or clinic pays relatively poorly, while procedures, even unnecessary ones, pay much better. If a patient wants an expensive procedure, which I consider to have marginal or no benefit, I cannot charge for the time to patiently explain to him why he may want to consider not having it, but I'll be readily paid for doing it. In the course of doing the procedure, the patient and I will, of course, commit the payor to a variety of expenses beyond my own fee. This type of scenario is the reason that our profit driven system drives up costs, without delivering a better product. In the end the consumer, who does not bear directly the brunt of the financial burden of the care he/she receives, drives the process. He/she will tend to want more than is good for them or society, and as long as providers including doctors profit by providing more, costs will continue to go up. MT
ReplyDeleteThanks for a very thoughtful and valuable comment, MT! I don't know how to reach you, but your imput is greatly appreciated.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that healthcare is expensive, however I do not think it is the government's fault that some people cannot get healthcare. In most counties there is already a plan to put anyone who cannot afford insurance care through things like a gold card that is based on how much income you make in a sliding scale. The fact that some people cannot get care is usually because they have yet to figure out how. Our local indigent clinic says there are millions of ways for Americans to get care that the government already pays for, including long term things like cancer.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous- I see your point about reform and malpractice insurance.
However, recently malpractice percentages are at the lowest they have been in years.
I also see your point about making sure the government controls what healthcare the patients should get. We are much too ignorant. I mean what better hands could our lives be in than the wonderfully wise and efficient government?
The phrase "good enough for government work" comes to mind.