How to Fix the healthcare crisis

It seems that when friends get togeth­er for cof­fee, lunch, or what­ev­er, they often end up resolv­ing all the major prob­lems of the day.

Such was the case recent­ly when a group of three got togeth­er for lunch and worked out the prob­lem of uni­ver­sal healthcare.

It’s obvi­ous that Congress can’t resolve the prob­lem; it’s tried for decades and still can­not come up with a rea­son­able solu­tion. Of course, Congress is torn between try­ing to address the con­cerns of the gen­er­al pub­lic and the health-relat­ed fac­tions that pour huge sums into their re-elec­tion cam­paigns and then seek res­o­lu­tions favor­able to them alone.

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But when three indi­vid­u­als can get togeth­er, even if they have oppos­ing polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions, and con­sid­er only what is ben­e­fi­cial for the most peo­ple, solu­tions come flood­ing out.

And so it was recent­ly, as we dis­cussed the prob­lem of the health­care sys­tem in the United States.

First, it should be not­ed that more than 70 coun­tries world­wide have some form of uni­ver­sal health­care. With that many exam­ples to exam­ine, it should be fair­ly easy to iden­ti­fy what is work­ing well and what needs tweak­ing, and then apply that knowl­edge to make a new­ly formed health­care sys­tem even better.

Even though we did not have access to infor­ma­tion that would have allowed us to exam­ine in detail 70 oth­er uni­ver­sal health­care sys­tems, our solu­tion seemed rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple and at least a start.

Our sum­ma­tion con­sist­ed of sim­ply pro­vid­ing health­care to every American cit­i­zen through a gov­ern­ment-con­trolled pro­gram, cut­ting out the mid­dle­men of pri­vate insur­ers (remem­ber, the ones who are throw­ing vast amounts of mon­ey at legislators?)

Of course, we all know that many gov­ern­ment oper­a­tions tend to func­tion per­func­to­ri­ly, and often, not very effi­cient­ly. But there are also many things that the gov­ern­ment does well, con­sid­er­ing the com­plex­i­ties of scale, so it seems very like­ly that a gov­ern­ment-run uni­ver­sal health­care sys­tem could be oper­at­ed at least as well as the mul­ti-tiered sys­tem now in place to pro­vide health care for Americans.

The cost of gov­ern­ment-run uni­ver­sal health­care will be enor­mous. There is no ques­tion about that. But health­care costs in America are already enor­mous, with much of the bur­den attrib­uted to the com­plex sys­tem we now oper­ate under. One premise is that a sin­gle-pay­er sys­tem would not only sim­pli­fy the sys­tem, mak­ing it eas­i­er for the providers, but also pro­vide a more con­stant and secure system.

The enor­mous cost of the pro­posed sys­tem would be fund­ed with high­er per­son­al taxes.

Oh no! Higher taxes!

Look at it this way. Suppose you and your employ­er each con­tribute to a health­care sys­tem. If those same funds were to go to a gov­ern­ment-fund­ed sys­tem, the indi­vid­ual would be no worse off in terms of the amounts they con­tribute. And since the rou­tine­ly healthy indi­vid­u­als would be con­tribut­ing the same as those with health issues, the fund would be broad-based, which is exact­ly what pri­vate health insur­ers do now. 

It would seem that indi­vid­u­als would be far bet­ter off know­ing that, should they suf­fer a major health issue with sub­stan­tial co-pays, they could receive care with­out ques­tion and with­out those addi­tion­al costs.

And even if an individual’s per­son­al income tax were to rise mod­est­ly, that would sure­ly be bet­ter than the poten­tial large sums they would face when their pri­vate health insur­ance cov­ers only a small por­tion of their costs.

There are obvi­ous­ly sev­er­al pros and cons to a uni­ver­sal health­care sys­tem. If rea­son­able peo­ple can get togeth­er to min­i­mize the cons, this coun­try could devise a sys­tem that works effec­tive­ly, effi­cient­ly, and ben­e­fi­cial­ly for all Americans.

And as for the cur­rent “let’s throw some­thing against the wall and see what sticks” pro­pos­al of giv­ing every American a $2,000 health ben­e­fit, one can only sur­mise that it might work pret­ty well for some­one who nev­er has to deal with a major health cri­sis. But, as hap­pened to an acquain­tance who recent­ly under­went can­cer treat­ment that cost over $250,000, the extra $248,000 that would have had to come out of their pock­et would have con­sumed every­thing they owned and still left them in debt.