A Couple of Comments on Health Care

From Susie at Suburban Guerrilla. It seems that the Heritage Foundation thinks we could do without group plans:

A Heritage foundation health policy shill named Edmund Haislmaier was on C-SPAN today, and he’s insisting that the only problem with private insurance is that the insurer works for your employer, and that it’s really your employer who’s saying no to covering your claim, not your insurer. . . .

Anyway, he says the real solution is to have people buy the insurance directly from the insurance companies - “because then they’re working for you, not your employer.”

And then, of course, the discounted premiums that are the whole basis of group plans could go right out the window. And, as Susie points out:

[T]he insurance companies (as mandated by law) work for the benefit of their shareholders. So as long as we have a for-profit healthcare system, ain’t no way around it.

In case you had any doubts about that part of it, Check this out:

A doctor has made a fortune running a company that buys hospitals and cancels their private insurance contracts so they can collect higher reimbursements, but some health professionals are decrying that business model.

Prime Healthcare's business plan allows hospitals to forgo some much-needed but less lucrative services, such as chemotherapy treatments, mental health care and birthing centers.

The motivations here aren't hard to figure out:

Hospitals generally sign contracts with insurance companies, often agreeing to collect only about 30 percent of their costs of treatment from the insurers in exchange for the steady stream of business.

Prime Healthcare's hospitals, mostly free of such private insurance contracts, can collect patients' entire bills from insurers.

The hospitals make up for fewer insurance company referrals by increasing traffic through emergency rooms and admitting those who need further care for longer stays.

Reddy also discourages doctors from giving patients treatment they can't afford, such as pacemakers and knee replacements.

He said his company's revenue is more than $500 million a year and that he is worth more than $300 million. Prime Healthcare now has more than 1,250 beds under its control.

Yeah, I guess our system is just the best, because after all, universal health care leads to you-know-what:

“National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?” read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.

Read this whole post, by the way. She's put together a good summary of a lot of information I've seen out there that sort of cuts the naysayers off at the knees -- Britain, France, Canada and the other wealthy nations with universal coverage (which is all of them but us) actually provide service as good as and sometimes better than ours at least cost to the government and to the citizens.

Footnote: All of the renewed focus on health coverage in the U.S. is, of course, in tandem with the release of Michael Moore's Sicko. I've never seen one of Moore's films, and I really have no plans to see this one -- I've had double helpings of outrage lately, thank you, and will pass. However, it occurs to me that the labeling is wrong. Everyone I've seen refers to Moore's films as "documentaries." From all indications, given the dissections of his biases and omissions of fact, they're not. They're polemics. He may be slightly more factually oriented than James Dobson (but then, almost anyone is), but there's no denying he has an agenda.