Two clear voices at the health summit (Feb. 27)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The only lawmaker at the health-summit table on Thursday who made any sense was Sen. Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. The reason he made sense is that he’s a doctor as well as a senator.
And, of course, hardly anybody listened to him.
Here are some of the points he made, in case you want to make a little sense out of the health-insurance reform debate:
(1) One of every three dollars we pay into the health care system doesn’t go toward actual care. That one in three dollars “doesn’t help anybody get well, and doesn’t prevent anybody from getting sick,” he said.
(2) Through rules and regulations, the government now controls 60 percent of the health care delivery decisions and activities in the country.
“If throwing money at it and creating new government programs could solve it, we wouldn’t be sitting here today,” he said.
(3) A large portion of the tests doctors order every day aren’t for the benefit of patients, they are for the benefit of doctors. “And the reason they’re there is because we are risk averse to the tort system and extortion system that’s out there today in health care.”
(4) On the whole, the health-care system does a great job of treating disease, but doctors have little incentive to prevent disease.
(5) Various kinds of fraud cost the health-care system more than $150 billion a year.
There was a guy standing outside Blair House while this summit was going on. He was carrying a sign that said, “Medicare for everyone.”
Has anyone really thought about that, or have the insurance company lobbyists permanently poo-pooed it? I guess my thinking is, if they hate that simple idea so much, there must be something to it.
Maybe Sen. Coburn and the sign carrier should get together.
