Talking Health

The fact that healthcare has become expensive and unequal in terms of who is covered and the services that are provided is a given. With the growth of umpteen insurance plans with neverending complex terminology, healthcare is a virtual mess of options. One plan, designed for the growing aged population, is Medicare. It is designed so that all Americans 65 or older receive basic healthcare. However, the reality is, as with most healthcare is that Medicare costs are ballooning out of control and the per state bill for Medicare depends on which part of the country you live in (Medicare Spending Still Varies By Region).

Furthermore, Medicare is plagued by what seems like the mantra of modern medicine. The more doctor to patients visits and costly procedures can be performed, the more that I can bill. Unfortunately, its not all the fault of patient care providers. The medical billing system trains patient caretakers to do work that can be somehow quantified. Doctors could spend countless hours and often do spend a lot of time with patients as health counselors but that is not billable beyond an office visit. So, maybe there needs to be a paradigm shift in medicine from seeing the patient as often as possible and referring for as many tests as possible to preventative therapy.  There should be an incentive for doctors to keep their patients out of their waiting rooms, hospitals, and off prescription medication.

Obama has a universal health plan not much unlike his Democratic predecessors Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry that would provide Universal Health Care. The idea of universal health care, is great in theory, but unfortunately the dollars and cents just don’t add up. There are an estimated 46 million Americans without healthcare and that number is growing by the day. Obama hopes to free up around $600 billion dollars that would go in a health reform reserve that he hopes to create off more taxation from the wealthiest Americans and unnecessary payouts to the Medicare Advantage Plan (which would lessen the profits for insurance companies, drug companies. and healthcare providers). Unfortunately, this money is still not enough to cover uninsured Americans and Obama is leaving most of the details of his health plan as well as many others to Congress to flesh out. This, of course, will leave lobbyists, special interest groups, and the lawmakers that serve them in a bitter fight which could stall progress on any sweeping changes.

However, despite all of the money set aside for healthcare and Obama’s vow to keep Medicare honest by refusing to pay for medical mistakes and reducing payouts overall to cut down on unnecessary procedures and pill pushing, it appears that he glosses over one important detai. Healthcare is one of the costliest expenditures in America and it according to the New York Times article with the link “health reform reserve,” it is driving future projections of unsustainable deficits. In other words, there is no quick fix to making healthcare more efficent and cost-effective. The complexity of the healthcare system as well as the endless overhead make it virtually impossible to effectively track dollars and cents or lessen the overall cost of say, an emergency room visit, an inpatient visit, or an outpatient visit. Furthermore, the government only regulates to parts of insurance, Medicaid (for the low income) and Medicare (for the aged). Unfortunately, it seems that cutting costs cannot be selective. Either the government must regulate all of healthcare or none of it. As long as healthcare is left to private insurers on an individual basis, the urge to profit will never subside. Especially, in this economy, most things are thought of as a business. Healthcare is really a business and most of the insurance companies are run in such a way that they are sustainable even in tough times. This comes at great cost to the individual as well as the collective because a largely uninsured populous is disadvantageous to world development but, sadly, even one’s health and well-being (what seems a universal right), is reduced to whether the bottom line is black.