“It does a couple of other things. It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that’s really reserved for Social Security. So either we’re double-counting them or we don’t intend on paying those Social Security benefits.
…The Senate Budget Committee chairman said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.“

With my emphasis added, that’s a quote from Rep Paul Ryan speaking at the Health Care Summit. You can see why so many congressmen want to throw out the current legislation. But if I had to throw my vote in, I’d be in the start-from-scratch camp.

First, a brief history lesson as I understand it. Health insurance started as a way to cover catastrophic health costs, such as chronic illness, diseases, accidents, etc, so as to not bankrupt the common American. The rise in medical science and medical technologies, combined with migration to cities and increasing incomes, increased demand for quality health care at hospitals. Blue Cross was created as a way to pre-pay for hospital visits and guarantee income to hospitals, and the protection of individuals, during The Great Depression. Fearing large hospital take-overs of individual physician care, and managed care legislation leaving out actual doctors, physicians decided they’d better get on board with the same concept.

…advocates of compulsory health insurance looked to the emerging social security legislation as a logical means of providing national health care. Compulsory health insurance was even more anathema to physicians than voluntary health insurance. It became clear to physicians that in order to protect their interests, they would be better off pre-empting both hospitals and compulsory insurance proponents by sculpting their own plan…

In this regard, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a set of ten principles in 1934 “… which were apparently promulgated for the primary purposes of preventing hospital service plans from underwriting physician services and providing an answer to the proponents of compulsory medical insurance” (Hedinger 1966, p. 82). Within these rules were provisions that ensured that voluntary health insurance would remain under physician supervision and not be subject to the control of non-physicians.

I think these brief quotes really sum up the problem we’re facing, and the crux between Republicans and Democrats. If Social Security was supposed to be the logical answer to national health care, how can we use Social Security money to pay the debt of other programs? And if we then run out of Social Security money and can no longer provide Social Security coverage, it’s no wonder the government will have to manage and/or subsidize everyone’s health care/insurance.

Eventually insurance would evolve into a “first-dollar-coverage” system, as noted by Harvard Professor Regina Herzlinger in “Who Killed Health Care?” Instead of people paying for most health coverage, such as regular doctor visits and procedures that wouldn’t break the bank, insurance subsidizes the bottom end. Instead of regularly paying a few hundred dollars for a doctor visit and having insurance pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars when you get cancer, you pay $25 for the all-you-can-schedule buffet of recommended check-ups and your “insurance” drops your coverage once your Chemo gets too expensive.

Thus, the complications of lifetime insurance caps, discrimination for pre-existing conditions, and the “donut” in the government’s Medicare.

Many experts have commented on how the current employer/government health management system desensitizes the common American to the actual cost of health insurance. What do you mean it costs $300 for an X-ray? Well, it takes this nearly harmless machine less than five seconds to give you an accurate depiction of your bone composition and density, what do you expect? Like almost anything in life, we have to realize that in medicine, too, you GET what you PAY FOR.

Do we need reform? Hell yes. But a government-run, managed-care, subsidized-for-all system we need not.

Institutional, societal reform will have to take place in order for people to get back to the basics of health “insurance.” But let’s move on to the issues on the congressional table.

How about instead of trying to let the government pay for more people to have health care,which is a very small percentage of Americans, we make modern-day health care more affordable? How do we do that? How about creating transparency in medical services to create competition? Emergencies happen, and one cannot be a savvy consumer when your kid falls off his bike and needs stitches in his forehead. But what about that foot that has been aching forever? Shouldn’t you be able to see either who has the cheapest-priced X-rays, or who provides the best physical therapy regime for your dollar?

And, imagine this, instead of your employer buying health care for you from pre-tax money, YOU buy it yourself — with the same pre-tax incentives?! Do you trust the government or your employer to buy your house or car or groceries? WHY do we let them buy and manage our HEALTHCARE!! I know when I bought my last MP3 player I spent weeks comparing features, costs and durability of nearly every product in my price range. Weeks. On an MP3 player. I’m on my second foot surgery in in one year. If I personally saw the bill for that, how long would I spend picking out THAT plan? Probably longer than the usual company HR rep. And even if I spent the same amount of time on picking  a plan, I probably wouldn’t pick the same insurance package that Sally down the hall would want.

Here’s what Sen John Barrasso [R-WY] had to say at the Summit:

“And it’s just a fundamental disagreement between us (Democrats and Republicans). Does Washington know best about the coverage people should have? Or should people have that choice themselves, pay a little less, get a little less coverage, or pay a little more and get more coverage?”

Obama’s response:

“It’s a good talking point, but it doesn’t actually answer the underlying question, which is do we want to make sure that people have a baseline of protection?

That’s what The “Great Orator” has in response? And therein lies the problem. The Democrats don’t want to admit to their true agenda — that under them the government will slowly gain control of every aspect of your life, because Daddy knows better.

Can most people afford a few hundred dollars every time they need to see a doctor? Yes, and it sure as hell would be a better incentive to STAY healthy if you knew you had to pay-as-you-use. Then when, God forbid, a catastrophic incident occurs you don’t go flat-out BANKRUPT.

(Obviously there are those who can’t pay for anything, but that’s the exception and not the rule. Currently we’re trying to re-balance the entire system for the exceptions.)

Two economists working at the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that 25 to 75 percent of those who do not purchase health insurance coverage “could afford to do so.”

Not fired up yet? The final straw to break the reasonable donkey’s back is probably Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly at Healh Reform Legislative hearings describing why Wellpoint is raising their rates by over 30 percent this year:

“Often hospitals come to us requesting a 40 percent increase, and if there is not competition among hospitals the regulators have said that it is inappropriate for us to terminate those hospitals from our networks, because then we’d have an access problem.”

From the horse’s mouth what happens in a market lacking competition:

To close, I’ll leave these facts from the The Business and Media Institute:

Fact: The Congressional Budget Office says that 45 percent of the uninsured will be insured within four months. CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin also said that the frequent claim of 40+ million Americans lacking insurance is an “incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the uninsured population.”

Fact: Liberal non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation put the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million. (The 8.2 million figure includes only those uninsured for two years or more.)

Fact: CBO analysis found that 36 million people would remain uninsured even if the Senate’s $1.6 trillion health care plan is passed.

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