Medicare For All

I saw this article on Google news this morning.  My initial reaction was that these people simply didn’t contribute enough to Pelosi’s last campaign.  While that’s true I also noticed that you don’t see much about the Medicare for all proposal in the news so I decided to comment on that.

First of all, I’m not as big a fan of HR 676 as you might think.  Medicare is a health insurance program.  To me it makes no sense for the government to run health care in that manner.  Here’s why;

§         You and I purchase health insurance because we don’t have the funds to hire the medical staff and purchase the equipment needed to treat our eventual medical problems.  This is not the case with a government.

§         If a healthcare provider’s primary motivation is money they are better off making the patient feel better without actually curing their problem.  This keeps the patient coming back.  Every business in the world loves repeat business.  Medicare for all would do nothing about this.

§         Over a lifetime there is no risk that you will get sick, injured, or both.  It’s a certainty.  You aren’t really insuring anything.  You are just pooling your money to pay for the eventual care that everyone will need.

§         Having healthcare structured in this way creates a claims billing and payment structure which really does nothing to treat the patient.  Yes, I’m saying that the entire health insurance industry is doing nothing to treat patients.  President Obama mentioned in one of his speeches that it’s 6% of the economy and indicated that he’s just not going to go to a single payor system.  I think that when you consider the people doing the billing it’s at least twice that.  So the current system and the “Medicare for all” system would have roughly 12% of the economy involved in nothing more than producing and paying claims.  I think I know why our health care is the most expensive in the world.

Don’t get me wrong on this.  I think healthcare is part of the government’s job for moral and practical reasons.  For the moral reasons I turn to the Bible.  If you look at Leviticus you will see that when people had problems they were to go to the priests.  In that time the priests were both the church and the government.  The argument can be made for either one being responsible for healthcare, but it can’t be made that healthcare should be a private venture.

Also, from a practical point the government should be doing healthcare for the same reasons that the government should be doing military, police, and fire. 

§         All of these require special training.  This training is expensive. 

§         There is a large portion of the time when you don’t need these services. 

§         When needed these services could save lives. 

§         Market forces combined with the above points will lead to infinite cost.  Don’t believe me?  Ok, how much would you pay for?

o       Someone to go into a burning building and rescue your family.

o       Someone to take murders, thieves, etc. to jail.

o       Someone to defend this country from all enemies foreign and domestic.

o       Someone to keep you alive.

Given all of that I still think that HR 676 would be better than any of the other things I have seen.