New Editorial for the Eagle

Still trying to decide whether or not to send it to them....

Dear Eagle Editorial Staff,

It appears that health care reform is not going to go away in Washington. There are many considerations to be made on both sides of the issue. However, one thing is known for certain and that is health care consumes a significant portion of US GDP.

Health care is expensive today because most individuals have no incentive to hold costs down. Employers or insurance companies pay most of the costs. Nothing in the current legislation addresses this problem. Bureaucrats want to control escalating costs by capping what insurances premiums are, not what health care actually costs.

Health insurance has become a means to health care payment rather than protection from catastrophic loss. If the US is to tackle these escalating costs, Health Insurance must return to be just that, insurance. High-deductible plans with Health Savings Accounts are fantastic alternative for people to have coverage and still be accountable for cost. These are all available today with no more legislation or interference. They just need to be encouraged and put into practice.

I also know that another certainty is that Congress will get health care wrong. The Washington Times reports recently that Congress expected Medicare to cost $12 billion by 1990 when they made their projections in 1967. Unfortunately they were wrong as Medicare cost $98 billion 23 years later. They missed their projections by 800% and regrettably the US Government has not improved their forecasting in recent years with Medicare and SCHIP following similar miscalculations. Can citizens of this country really afford to have the government to miss projections by this wide margin again? We are now looking at trillion dollar miscalculations.

Under proposed legislation, insurance companies will be forced to insure people that normally would not be insured and cover conditions they would not normally cover. Furthermore, they will be forced to hold premiums down while taking more risk. This is bound to drive many, if not all of them, out of business. After all, healthy people will still not buy insurance and will wait until they are sick to buy coverage. The insurance companies cannot deny them under new rules. How is this different than a driver buying auto insurance after he wrecks his car and expecting full coverage? It is not a sustainable business model.

The competitive market for quality health care is starting to show signs of life. Retail clinics are appearing in malls and shopping centers. These clinics give consumers an affordable alternative to the doctor’s office. Many pharmacies now have $4 generic prescriptions, driving drug costs down. Quality care is also being marketed in foreign countries where surgeries can be done at a fraction of the price one would expect to pay in a US hospital. These are all market-based solutions that need to be encouraged, not sacrificed to special interest groups representing corporations and health care professionals. Cosmetic surgery and laser eye surgery are all very good examples of how market forces can lower the cost and raise the quality of care in this very way.

I do not believe anyone, on either side of the issue, wants to deny anyone access to quality health care. Ironically, the proposals being circulated today may just do that very thing. Let’s let the markets work and hold down costs through competition in health care, not insurance. Let’s also get health insurance back to actually being insurance. Make individuals accountable for costs and let markets work through a market-based system of affordable, high-deductible health insurance and Health Savings Accounts. This alone will determine what the right portion of GDP health care should consume. These small changes can save all of us from rising costs, further government interference and additional misguided projections from Washington.

-Doug