Health Care Realities

I continue to believe that significant health care reform is a necessity if the USA is to come up to the standards of other developed countries in terms of the accessibility of basic preventive care for all Americans as well as coverage for when a catastrophic illness strikes. Currently, those without health care coverage often either receive no care or resort to Emergency Room treatment - the most expensive way to get what would otherwise be routine treatment. In short, inexpensive preventive care is forgone and when otherwise preventable illness sets in then vastly more expensive treatment is needed. The process is not cost effective and drives up overall costs exponentially. Paul Krugman looks at the reality of the the current mess and also the false claims of the GOP and some Blue Dog Democrats who seek to obstruct reform. Here are some highlights:

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The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

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Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend.

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Which brings us to the current debate over reform. Right-wing opponents of reform would have you believe that President Obama is a wild-eyed socialist, attacking the free market. But unregulated markets don’t work for health care — never have, never will. To the extent we have a working health care system at all right now it’s only because the government covers the elderly, while a combination of regulation and tax subsidies makes it possible for many, but not all, nonelderly Americans to get decent private coverage.
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Now Mr. Obama basically proposes using additional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us. That’s not radical; it’s as American as, well, Medicare.