Obama may have defined the issue (Feb. 24)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
When Barack Obama was running for president, he used to call his health initiative “health care reform.” Now, he is calling it “health insurance reform,” which has been the point all along.
The country has a great health care system of physicians, pharmacies, nurses, hospitals, research institutions and other care-givers.
But the way we pay all these people has become goofy.
Thirty percent of the private health care dollar paid to insurance companies goes into those companies’ coffers to offset their costs of operation and provide them with a profit. This means that over the years, the cost of health insurance to most people who pay for their own is outrageous. To the companies and government entities who pay for their employees’ insurance, the cost for several years has been the fastest-growing of almost all their expenses of doing business.
The public pays for this insurance in added cost of the products they buy and in the taxes they pay to support the public agencies who in turn give the money to insurers.
There is also a secret cost — secret to the extent that most of us don’t realize we pay it when we do — and that is the money that paying customers shell out to provide medical care for the indigent. Hospitals are legally required to treat indigents when they seek care, regardless of whether those patients can pay. The cost of that care is born through higher fees for service that insurers and individuals pay when they write checks to hospitals and physicians.
The insurers aren’t necessarily the bad guys in all this. We all are to blame. We have made a once-simple system — “hospital insurance” which helped pay for hospitalization, surgery and other big-ticket treatments — into a crazy quilt of plans and entitlements that few can afford.
Does Obama have the solution? Probably not. But he is closer to defining the problem.
