Turn on the news and watch about 5 minutes. Chances are that unless you tuned in to the local sports roundup, that you heard at least one story about health. Even if you were listening to the local sports roundup, you probably heard about some athlete at a local high school with swine flu. Obesity, H1N1, Medicare Part D, government health plans funding abortion, and smoking are just a few of the issues that all make great fodder for the national healthcare reform debate. One of President Obama’s key campaign promises was reforming the healthcare system. The fact remains that the United States remains the only industrialized nation without some sort of national, comprehensive health plan. Is that a bad thing? Probably. But if you have paid any attention to the national debate, it is clear now more than ever that our nation’s lawmakers have a long way to go if we are ever going to make any progress on the issue.
I wrote an article back in September that highlighted the root causes of the healthcare debate, which you can see here. After a lot of spirited debate in Congress, and Democrats backing down on the so called “public option,” it seems like all that we are left with is a plan that is expensive and inefficient. The United States already holds the world title in the expensive and inefficient category with nearly twice as much health care spending per capita than any other wealthy nation in the world. We spend over $7500 per citizen on healthcare, nearly one-fifth of our GDP, and yet as I have mentioned before, the overall health of the US lags behind almost every other industrialized nation on the planet. The current House plan for healthcare reform was reviewed by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which released its findings this week. The CBO estimated that the House plan will bring in $167 billion dollars over 10 years in penalties paid by people that would rather pay fines than get health coverage. The House plan suggests that it will help bridge the health care gap by covering up to 96% of the population from the current 83% that has adequate coverage. However, the plan also substantially relies on the fees collected from the uninsured to pay for expanding coverage. It might just be me, but something about that sounds a bit misguided at best. According to President Obama, the main reason that the healthcare system needs reform is to make it more affordable for Americans. Therefore, creating a system in which 10 million or more people would rather pay fines than get coverage somehow doesn’t seem like a more affordable solution.
Congratulations, Washington, it looks like we have a winner. If more people than anticipated rush to get coverage, we have a system that can’t be paid for, and if we fine the uninsured to pay for it, we have created a system that isn’t any more affordable than we have right now. What it really boils down to is that lawmakers are unable or unwilling to put aside partisan differences to effect real change. Liberal Democrats want a public option with the ability to set artificially low prices like Medicaid to pay for services. Moderate Democrats want the ability for the government to negotiate directly with providers to prevent an artificially cheap government program that draws people out of the private sector, which would hurt doctors. Republicans more or less want to keep things the same and let the free market reign with a few little changes like capping malpractice and encouraging competition by allowing insurance to be sold across state lines.
Whether you pay attention to the finer details about why the health care debate isn’t working or not, you need to pay attention to the bigger issue at hand. The reason that each of you as dads and husbands and sons and brothers should be very concerned is that if healthcare reform gets passed in its current watered down, lukewarm, inefficient, ineffective state, then we are all in for a lot more harm than good. This is an all or nothing deal .If Congress doesn’t create a plan that is affordable for everyone, then all of the legislation and regulation that will be required to implement these changes will only make things more expensive for everyone. I have seen the writing on the wall. As an employee for a small company, I currently have a high deductible policy that barely does more than prevent me from going bankrupt if I get sick or have an accident. I just received a letter last week that my health insurance company is no longer going to provide coverage in Texas, my state of residence. Coincidence? I think that private insurers are bracing themselves and getting out of risky markets now while they still can. The result? My company switches to a new insurer with one less choice and just a little less competition… 
Dave Baldwin is a businessman, musician, and divorced father of two boys. They live together in El Paso, TX.
This is a well reasoned and generally fair response to the healthcare debate, which is really quite rare. I applaud you.
That being said, you did buy into one of the primary lies driving the healthcare debate: that “the overall health of the US lags behind almost every other industrialized nation on the planet”. Unfortunately this has been passed off as truth.
The statistic most often used to “prove” that we are far behind other industrialized nations is life expectancy. It is true that our life expectancy generally lags most industrialized nations by, generally, 2-4 years. But you cannot immediately leap to the conclusion that this is due to poor healthcare, or even healthcare that is not on par with our socialized neighbors.
If you subtract traffic fatalities and fatalities due to “man caused” death (murder, work accidents, soldiers dying overseas, etc) and to be fair, do the same for other socialized nations, our life expectancy actually is better than other industrialized nations.
Of course, this opens up a whole different bag of worms, as it could be argued that this shows our safety standards are subpar, we perhaps work our labor too hard, our roads are too long (our nation is big!) and too few of us ride public transportation, etc. But that is a completely different argument, unrelated to healthcare.
But that said, your article was informative and fair. =)
Steven thanks for the comments. I can concede that the life expectancy argument could be offset by some of the factors that you mentioned. But when you look at some of the other points that “lag behind” it definitely points to the need for some sort of reform. Infant mortality in the US is consistently higher than our industrialized neighbors. Add in the fact that we spend substantially more per citizen on health care, yet out of pocket expenses in the United States are higher than other OECD countries, I think the overall conclusion is that we have a system that is at best inefficient and at worst unsustainable.
The larger issue of addressing lifestyle issues in the United States is an interesting sub debate. I would argue that a great deal of the health and disease related problems that are prevalent in the US have more to do with our lifestyle than our health care system’s ability to deal with the problems. Heart disease and diabetes are two areas that come to mind.
Thanks for reading. I hope you follow us at The Father Life regularly.
I, too, would take issue with the overall health of the people of US as a measure of the quality of care offered in the US. It certainly says something about the people of the US and their activities in comparison to the rest of the industrialized world, and it may say something about cost as well, but it does not necessarily have a logical connection to the quality of care available in the US healthcare industry. The fact that people from other industrialized nations come to the US for care that is either better or faster (or both) seems to me to be a pretty good endorsement of the quality of care the US has to offer. This isn’t to say that we don’t need to address the issue of cost – it is a real problem – but there is something in our existing system that has given us an extremely high quality of available care. We need to be careful not to short circuit that in the process of reform.
Very well-written article, Dave! Our country’s healthcare system badly needs reform, but what is currently being proposed in Washington ain’t reform. And you accurately point out one of the biggest flaws of this plan – namely our Nation’s inability to pay for it…
Until Congress can come up with a national healthcare plan they would be willing to have themselves, we still have work to do… -B