Analysts Announce: Health Care Reform Requires Health Care Reform

Over at my "Public Option Health Care Now Blog", I have just published a commentary on a Washington Post article that tells us all what we already knew:  Insuring 47 million additional people under America's current wasteful and unnecessarily expensive health care regime will simply multiply the waste and the cost of the waste:

The US Congress' budget analysts are saying that paying insurance companies to cover the uninsured will not constitute money-saving reform, but will only multiply the current inefficiencies in the system according to the number of people currently uninsured, which is 47 million and rising, as people lose their jobs.  The Washington Post says,

Congress's chief budget analyst delivered a devastating assessment yesterday of the health-care proposals drafted by congressional Democrats, fueling an insurrection among fiscal conservatives in the House and pushing negotiators in the Senate to redouble efforts to draw up a new plan that more effectively restrains federal spending.

Under questioning by members of the Senate Budget Committee, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee do not propose "the sort of fundamental changes" necessary to rein in the skyrocketing cost of government health programs, particularly Medicare. On the contrary, Elmendorf said, the measures would pile on an expensive new program to cover the uninsured.  WaPost

Now, I hope the US Congress will not conclude that reform is impossible because it requires . . . reform. Let's face it. Everyone and his brother has a vested interest in the exagerated prices of services that cost two hundred dollars in the United States and ten dollars in Brazil. It may actually require everyone in the United States being priced out of the medical market before enough people realize that revolutionary reform is required, not glacial evolutionary reform.

Unfortunately, just as the Foundering Fathers made more provisions for the ownership of guns than for medical care for those accidentally shot, they made no provisions for health care in general. And just as there are many homeless people in the United States, we may well arrive at a point where no one at all has insurance and everyone relies on the "free market", which is what Republicans would favor in any case. Insurance, after all, is a form of socialization of risk and ALL socialism is, of course, intolerable, no matter what essential necessity it provides that can't be provided any other way.

Unfortunately there may come a time when the vast majority of Americans can only receive the health care that they can pay for on their credit cards. That, effectively, is the message our Congresspeople have received from the budget analysts, if we keep on doing what we've always done, but simply multiply it by 115% in order to cover the uninsured.

Why do hospitals lose CAT Scan results and do them again, instead of computerizing the records?  Perhaps it's because they can bill more for duplicating tets than for using the ones they already have.

We will ultimately have to face the reality that the reason the US health care system is so expensive and still leaves 15% of the country with no access to consistent medical care whatever is that the system is full of payola, it's record-keeping has barely improved over the last two centuries, it's wasteful, and bloated. And with all of that, it still doesn't work.

But, look at the bright side. If you ultimately find that you can't pay for the medical care you need with the available balances left on your credit cards, you can always fly to Brazil or France, where everyone is covered by Government health care programs.  No matter how bad it gets in the United States, the reality is that we may never, ever have what others take for granted, unless the US Congress gets serious about inventing a new model, or copying one from overseas, at least for the uninsured.