The Healthcare Crisis and Solution

Discussion in 'Politics' started by joepistole, Aug 24, 2007.

  1. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    I am among the fortunate in that I have good healthcare insurance as I work for a large organization. However, many in our country do not. I cannot imagine what it would be like to not have healthcare insurance. But as healthcare costs rise each year I have to pay more and more of the expense. When I entered the workforce healthcare was part of the retirement benefit…but no more. My company did away with healthcare for retirees as well as the pension plan…too expensive.
    Our beloved president’s answer to the problem is: give them more tax breaks. I am sure he and his advisors spent all of 15 seconds in deriving that answer. It is a continuation of their two standard solutions to problems: tax breaks, or blow the hell out of it I just don’t know how in good conscience a good Republican could say the answer to the Healthcare problem is a subsidy in the form of a tax break to make insurance more affordable! The stated theory being more people looking for and purchasing insurance will drive down the cost of healthcare. I just think to myself, what morons we have leading this country. Are they really that stupid or do they think we are that stupid! Did junior learn anything at Yale Business School?
    The cost of health care has been growing at double digits for a very long time. The problem is too much demand for healthcare and too little supply driving up health care costs. It is a basic supply and demand problem. And many cannot get healthcare insurance because they are uninsurable…they have pre-existing medical conditions like cancer. How is that meager subsidy going to help someone who has cancer get an insurance policy….answer…it won’t!

    What ever happened to Supply Side Economics first practiced by our beloved Ronald Regan? His solution was not a tax break, but a philosophy and policy that encouraged increased supply of product and services. The classic solution to a price problem is to increase supply which drives down costs and encourages competition and efficiency.

    So given the well established relationships between supply and demand and the history of runaway healthcare cost increases, why is no one looking to increase supply of health care providers, products and services? Could it be the lobbyists who spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on our elected representatives encouraging them to continue the status quo which allows providers to operate as monopolies? Why are we not training more doctors? Our method of training doctors is very expensive and long. Is it the best? Given the facts, I don’t think so. Doctors trained in all other parts of the industrialized and non industrialized world train doctors in much less time and at much less expense. Prescription drugs are offered at market for much less than we pay in the United States. And the funny thing is most of the drugs we buy were developed with our tax money and licensed to pharmaceutical companies to complete and distribute. Most pharmaceutical drug research goes to modifying existing drugs so patents can be extended and not on new drugs. When we have an industry ripe with legally enacted and protected mini monopolies like we do in the healthcare and related industries, they are going to act like unregulated monopolies, and they have and continue to do so with a vengeance.

    .So why are we not focusing on the supply end of our healthcare problem?
     
    Last edited: Aug 24, 2007
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    It seems to have failed. That, of course, becomes a separate argument that I admit I'm not up to at the moment.

    The thing with healthcare is a similar problem that we have with other "virtuous" products. Journalism comes to mind. In either case, we might say that the point of health care is to keep society strong by keeping people healthy, or simply to keep people healthy. But health care is a business, and not a social principle. (We may be seeing a transformation of that point taking place in American society, but it's a long way to the other side.) The point of a business is to profit. The problem this presents with journalism and healthcare is that the integrity of the products are subject to the needs (or desires, or inclination) of the investors who seek to profit from the venture. While it is popular to blame lawyers for jacking the costs of healthcare with lawsuits, the question still remains as to what should be done about legitimate malpractice; the lawsuits aren't going away any time soon. Additionally, as healthcare becomes more and more institutionalized and focused on "economization" and "efficiency", we'll see more and more lawsuits like the occasional one about the mental health facility releasing a patient who then kills someone or commits suicide. The problem is that by focusing on economization and efficiency (or, rather, profit), we're diminishing the purpose of actually creating and maintaining health.

    The problem with supply side economics is the same problem communism encounters: a lack of good faith among the participants. The old economic argument about management and labor always fell back on the exploitation of the laborers. Laborers can create and manage on their own; managers without labor ...? Of course, the answer to that question is that there's always a laborer willing to work for a lower price. This is largely beside the point, except that it comes back to good faith. Supply side presumed that the benefits would trickle down. The problem is that they didn't trickle down as expected. The idea that coddling the supply side of the healthcare industry will improve healthcare is questionable inasmuch as the general economic principle, applied in the U.S. actually contributed to the growing economic disparity in our society. (e.g., Great, so we have X new millionaires; we have disproportionately more poor people, as well.)

    We need to decide whether certain industries intended to benefit people in specific ways vital to our society ought to be treated like "any other business". Just like it's not a "liberal media conspiracy" but the rush for ratings and profit that has journalism reeling, keeping profit so high on the priority list for healthcare threatens the purpose of and access to healthcare.

    Who the hell is going to pay for socialized medicine? The answer seems obvious, but people are unwilling to separate healthcare from the profit structure of American "capitalism".

    Or ... so says me.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    The demand for health care is infinite, and will expand to absorb any supply.

    The major drivers of health care prices in the US are the huge increase in the relative disposable income of the rich, the heavy administrative and overhead costs of private health insurance, and the protection of the market by various regulations.

    Health care has to rationed. We have chosen to ration it by establishing a thousand very expensive bureaucracies of highly paid experts to competitively deny insurance coverage to the unprofitably ill, shaping our regulatory structure so as to allow the very rich access to the basic resources of its supply limited only by their relative ability to pay, and protecting the markets of various madical goods and services so as to guarantee large profits for their suppliers.

    This rations health care by income and employment status of the sick person - which is one of the most profitable ways, since those most likely to erode profits by raising costs are also those least likely to have high incomes or good jobs. So the costs are kept down, and the prices kept up.

    So we have an entire demographic class of people who see a dentist for the first time during their first year in jail, and hundreds - thousands - of highly skilled and expensively trained medical personnel whose employment consists of artificially augmenting the dimensions of undiseased and normal human breasts.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    Thank you for your thoughtful commentary. Tiassa, it seems from this and your other posts Good Faith is a major personal theme, and while I agree good faith is very important, it is just not realistic in our real world to expect all players to act in good faith. I come from rural America, and I understand good faith very well. I grew up in a world where some ones word was a good as gold. It does not work outside rural America. In the big world, every player is out to maximize returns…unfortunately.
    Economics is the study of social behavior with respect to distribution of goods and services in a given society. It is a rational endeavor based on many years of observation and testing. So it is one of the most reliable of social studies. Communism failed because it relied on Good Faith. Under the Communists system, we were all to act in the communal interest…it failed miserably and we are still paying the price of that social experiment today.
    Trickle down which you referenced was a theory based on favoring the rich. If privileges were given to the rich, all would benefit thought the trickle down effect…proof of this is pretty much non existent. But that is not what we are talking about with making healthcare more affordable. We are talking about reducing costs. We are talking about changing the system so that no player has an unfair advantage in the market place. The only way to reduce costs is to increase supply of doctors, nurses, labor, technology, drugs. And the only way to increase supply is to eliminate the barriers to entry and the monopolies that exist within the industry…and there are many all created by our elected representatives.
    Iceaura, if demand for healthcare were infinite as you suggest we would all be doctor offices all day and all night demanding services. Personally, I like to avoid doctor offices and healthcare providers as much as possible…in part because it is boring sitting around in healthcare facilities and second because they like to do nasty things to ones body like stick them with sharp objects. So under your assertion, we must all be hypochondriacs and I don’t believe that to be the case…no doubt there are some of those around but they as small in number. It is a myth that healthcare must be rationed and limited. Healthcare like anything else is a commodity. It could and should be subject to competition like other segments of our society. We don’t seem to have problems with other sectors of our economy (except oil where supply and prices are controlled by oil companies on the oil cartels e.g. OPEC).
     

Share This Page