For some reason, in the U.S. healthcare has been singled out as this thing that most people seem to agree should be paid for privately by individuals and their insurance companies. I propose that we rethink this fundamental assumption and reclassify healthcare as something we provide to everyone living in our country equally and without charge.
Right now, in the U.S. we're paying ~20% of GDP for healthcare. Part of the cost of providing healthcare in our country is billing and collecting money from a byzantine network of individuals and private insurance companies, each of which has its own little eccentricities: Medicare will only pay so much for a certain treatment but nothing for this other treatment. Medicaid will pay for this but not for that. Blue Cross/Blue Shield will pay for some things but not others...
If doctors and hospitals didn't have to bill patients and their insurance carriers, and they didn't have to worry about trying to collect overdue payments, etc., they could focus their energy and resources on providing quality healthcare to everyone, rather than worrying about the money. If implemented properly, this would lower healthcare costs overall.
Read the following two scenarios, and think about why one of them should be paid for by individuals and their private insurance carriers and why it's generally accepted in the U.S. that the other case is just provided free of charge as a benefit of being a resident:
Scenario A:
A young family living in Seattle has a 6 year old child. One day while both parents are at work and their child is being cared for by a nanny, the child is kidnapped by a pedophile from a local play park and driven across state lines to the pedophile's hideout in Idaho.
Over the next two weeks SPD and the FBI manage to track down the sinister pedophile at his lair in a bunker somewhere in rural Idaho. LEO's successfully coordinate a massive raid on the bad guy's hideout, rescue the terrified child from the clutches of the pedophile and reunite him with his grateful parents.
On the news, an SPD spokeswoman mentions that the coordinated rescue effort to save the child cost upwards of $1MM. Would any Americans expect that the young family who were the victims of this horrible crime should be held personally responsible to pay for the expenses incurred by SPD and the FBI to rescue their child? Probably not, right?
Police protection is considered a right that all residents are entitled to receive regardless of how rich or poor they are, regardless of whether they're unemployed, working, have insurance or not...
Scenario B:
A young family living in Seattle has a 6 year old child. One day while both parents are at work and their child is being cared for by a nanny, the little boy gets hit by a car driven by a drunk driver while crossing the street in a marked crosswalk.
The nanny immediately calls 911 to activate the EMS. An ambulance arrives on scene in under 3 minutes and whisks the child off to the local ER, where doctors perform emergency surgery saving the child's life. The child spends the next week in the ICU and then another week in a regular hospital room before finally being released to his loving parents and their grateful nanny.
The total costs for the ambulance, surgery and 2 week hospital stay add up to just over $1MM. How many Americans would think that this young family should be held personally responsible for paying all of their child's medical bills? No insurance? Aww, too bad they'll just have to sell their house and car and declare bankruptcy so they can pay the hospital bills. WTF! Why?
Think about it for a moment. Why is there a difference between people's attitudes about who should pay the bills in these two scenarios? Why is there this disconnect? If you get sick and have big medical bills, that's all on you as an individual to figure out how to pay for them. On the other hand, an individual or a corporation that has been the victim of a crime can receive unlimited amounts of law enforcement resources at no charge. Why?
My proposal is that we reexamine how we think about health care. People aren't getting sick or going to the hospital because they want to. It sucks worse for the people who are sick than it does for the rest of us who are usually healthy and just have to pay a little bit higher taxes to ensure that everyone who lives in our country has access to the same high quality medical care and never has to worry about how he's going to pay for it.
