Last Health Care Reform Post For A While

This will be the last post on health care reform at least for a few weeks, I think we all could use a break from it. As you know from previous posts, I believe that the current health care reform debate is fundamentally flawed since no one on either side of the debate is discussing the basic problem: what is the core reason(s) for rising health care costs? Until you can identify and quantify the root causes, than Obama's health care reform plans are nothing more than a trillion dollar plus crap shoot.

Love My Country, Loathe My Government" contains a simple analogy that explains this problem. Let's assume you have a cough. Do you have:

• A head cold
• An allergy
• Laryngitis
• Strep throat
• Bronchitis
• Pneumonia
• Long Cancer
• You are a hypochondriac

You decide to go to a doctor for treatment. If he or she is a good doctor, they will analyze the problem using their education, experience, and equipment. They will identify and quantify the root cause of your cough and put a plan together to solve the problem. Illness solved.

Let's assume that your cough is symbolic of rising health care costs in this country. Yes, rising health care costs is the SYMPTOM of an underlying problem or two, they are not the cause of the problem. The root cause of rising health care costs could be any number of factors:

• Doctors make too much money
• Malpractice lawyers make too much money
• Drug companies make too much money
• Insurance companies make too much money
• Doctor's order too many unnecessary tests
• There is too much government interference and red tape in the industry
• There is too much fraud in the system

Obama and the rest of the political class have not identified the root cause(s) unlike what your doctor did with your cough symptom. In Obama's world, he would remove a lung, assuming lung cancer, prior to being sure it was lung cancer. The operation may be a success, i.e. the lung is successfully removed, but you still have the cough because you had strep throat. Until the political class does their analysis, the whole debate is an exercise in futility and an unlikely solution.

I bring this issue up again because of an article by Catherine Arnst in a July 27, 2009 in Business Week magazine. State level efforts to solve the rising health care costs without understanding the cause have not gone well:

• Just three years after implementing its universal health care program, Massachusetts wants to end the practice of reimbursing for every medical visit and doctor visit, it was too expensive.
• The state's universal health care program did not contain rising costs in the state, "wreaking havoc on the state's finances."
• Health care costs in Massachusetts have risen 42% in the past three years, faster than they did prior to the universal care program was put in place.
• The state legislature formed a commission to find a way to end the expensive fee-for-services system just three years after it was implemented.
• In the latest budget the plan is to eliminate health care subsidies for 30,000 legal residents (sounds a little like the "R" word = rationing).
• The state of Maine instituted its own version of universal health care in 2005 but premiums in its state-financed health care insurance have risen 74% since its inception, hardly cost containment.

Thus, not knowing what the root cause of rising health care costs are has resulted in dire financial problems with the two states with universal health care insurance. The same result is likely on a national level with Obama's plan since his does not have the root cause(s) identified, or if he does, he has not told us.

A quick note on the Cash For Clunkers program. In a previous post I went through my analysis of why the program is a failure on any number of levels. I suggest you go to the website, www.peacefreedomprosperity.com and look for an article by Kaz Vorpal, "Cash For Clunkers Causes Pollution and Poverty." Mr. Vorpal elegantly yet simply explains more reasons while this program was an utter failure on many levels, levels I had not even considered.