3/22/10: Common Sense and how it relates to Health Care

As a political newcomer who entered the race for Congress last year, the health care fiasco and the deception that was used to pass it into law are exactly why I am running. While consultants, pollsters, politicians, and candidates from both parties will spout figures, clauses, and dollar amounts that will no doubt contradict what the other side is saying, I will focus on simple common sense. Regardless of what your politics, education, or financial situation, there are a few things that simply do not pass the smell test when it comes to the claims of democrats that they can give better coverage to everybody, while at the same time lowering the costs.

The first myth of being allowed to keep your coverage if you want, will fall victim to the reality that all levels of government find themselves in currently. With the terrible shape our cities and states find themselves in financially, does anyone think for a second that the every increasing costs of health care coverage isn’t going to be target number one in their efforts to reduce budgets as soon as possible? What elected official isn’t going to use the promise of the democrats that ‘everyone is going to receive the same level of coverage that a sitting member of Congress has,’ as they look at dumping their municipal employees into whatever the ‘new’ program consists of. Now, if there is any possibility that the employees may decide to fight this move, imagine for a second the ‘compromise’ that by unloading the burden of providing insurance to these employees, each employee would receive an immediate raise of 10%. With current estimates of health care benefits costing employers 20% of an employees pay, it looks like a win-win for both sides! How many people would turn down a ten percent raise effective immediately, while not having to give up anything in the form of health care coverage? After all, the President of the United States has told them that the evil insurance companies will not be allowed to refuse anybody for any reason! When they need coverage for an illness, they simply walk in and tell the insurance company they are there to get it. Until that day, they will simply have to pay some small fine for not carrying the coverage mandated by the Federal Government, but the large increase in their pay resulting from their employer dropping their coverage will more than offset this fine. Common Sense tells us that with the amount being paid INTO the insurance pool from this sort of a deal being greatly reduced, the added money needs to come from somewhere and that will ultimately be the Federal Government…the same government that gets it’s money through taxes!

Another problem that I see coming down the road when applying simple Common Sense is the quality of care, and more importantly the amount of time the average person will receive with their doctor, once thirty million more people are added to our current system. The simple math of adding ten percent more patients to the workload of the existing number of doctors, tells me that it is going to add at least ten percent more in the area of wait times…if the number of doctors remains the same. However I do not believe that the number of doctors available to the average person will remain constant, but will be reduced! I believe that many of the best doctors will be ‘hired’ by the wealthiest among us to serve as their personal health care specialists. Does anybody think that for a moment in our capitalist system the wealthy are not going to figure out a way to insure that they and their families will continue to receive the best care in the land? And what doctor is going to decide to stay in a system that will be further complicated by a government worker who didn’t get hired at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but went to work at the ‘Department of Health Care Administration’ instead? Rather than dealing with these workers, begging for their reimbursements, the best doctors will simply get a check from their elite group of patients…..sounds like an easy decision to me. Common Sense tells me that the rest of us will be left with the remaining doctors who are not among the best in their fields. Now at some point the Federal Government may outlaw the practice I have described, but until then many of us who are currently getting very good medical treatment will see the real world results of this plan and that is a lower quality of service.

A third problem that the current health care fiasco will have to deal with is a lower number of intelligent young people deciding to go into the profession of medicine. If you are one of the brightest individuals entering college, will you risk the possibility of going into the medical field not knowing the end results of this drastic change in our health care system, or will you decide to go into potentially more lucrative professions such as business or law? Why would you dedicate all of the years to get through medical school, not to mention the costs of it, if you were not sure what the long term prospects of your profession were financially? With the government at some point having to, as the President says, ‘bend the cost curve,’ is there any doubt that some of this bending will be at the expense of the very care givers who we will be asking more from over time? Common Sense tells me that this will result in even less time doctors can spend with patients, longer waits, and ultimately a lower quality of service as we lower the bar for people to become doctors. Medical schools will be forced to lower their standards in order to insure that there are enough people with medical degrees, in order to avoid the public outrage that will follow if people are told they have to wait much, much longer just to see a doctor! Some may call this rationing, but our President has told us this will not happen, so it couldn’t be!

While virtually everyone including myself has said that our current health care system needed to be fixed, we differed on many of the solutions. Rather than dealing with the issues all sides could agree on, and building a better system from there, our current leadership in Washington, DC has decided to ram their own ideas down our throats and has left our country more divided that at any time in my memory. The President who promised he would be a ‘Uniter’ does not seem to care what more than 50% of our country has said regarding his ideas on health care reform. What I fear is even worse, is that by the time our country comes together and realizes that this health care reform fiasco is not what it was promised, it may be too late to even get back to where we are today…..however imperfect it is.