Healthcare: Win-Win for All

A number of my good friends, ranging from students to business owners in their 20's through 60's, have no health coverage. This past year I increased my family's deductible from $0 to $500 to keep the premiums down. Low and behold I needed several CT scans and in came the bill for $500 after insurance paid the rest. That's after a $13,000 annual health insurance premium. Certainly, nothing close to the coverage many of our elected officials receive.

Many people I have spoken to on the bus these past weeks have shared how they put off going to the doctor (this often includes their kids too) due to the cost. Later they have an emergency room visit that could have been avoided with less costly preventative care.

It's time to revisit single payer national healthcare. Large corporations win because this is a significant operating cost for them for active and retired employees. If this expense could be cut, their profits would increase and in turn they'd contribute more taxes and would keep more jobs in the U.S. These employees would also be contributing taxes, too.

Small businesses win because healthcare is often prohibitive and attracting and retaining quality employees is impacted by this fact. Municipalities and property owners benefit from this because many workers and retirees are covered by fairly generous and costly healthcare.

The uninsured would benefit because they would more likely seek less costly preventative treatment as discussed briefly above. In the end their emergency visit treatments are paid by the taxpayers or policy holders in higher premiums.

Medical providers benefit because they can provide the best level of care and be less swayed by insurers who dictate level of care based on profitability, not patients' needs. They also benefit because a more streamlined program is likely to have fewer errors and their liability coverage would be reduced accordingly. This is one of the largest expenses most practitioners face and a core reason for leaving the medical profession.

The fact is that when we total all active and retired local, county, state and federal employees (including military and veterans), medicare and medicaid, taxpayers are shouldering half of the annual U.S. healthcare burden in one manner or another. But this is very, very inefficient with redundant record keeping among hundreds of insurers often causing medical practitioners to spend upwards of 50% of their time performing wasteful and error prone administrative functions versus practicing medicine.

Experts in this field estimate that 30% of costs or more could be eliminated just by streamlining and consolidating. The second and third largest expenses are reporting errors and fraud estimated to be as much as 20% of healthcare costs. However, one of the most manageable costs is the prescribing and over-prescribing of drugs and treatments.

The drug industry has one of the highest profit margins among all businesses as can be plainly seen by the run up by 500% of the "new" Medicare system in the past few years.

Twenty percent profit is not unusual and patents are often extended so lower cost generics can't be manufactured. If these companies were to competitively bid for government purchases their costs would drop 20% or more. Our government can influence cooperation because these companies need Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval for new drugs to come onto the market, so playing ball makes sense to them. Otherwise, we can purchase from foreign drug manufacturers.

Large corporations and taxpayers share a common win-win goal that only two powerful entities, through their rich lobbying groups have tried to stop for over twenty years: the drug and insurance companies who might see their profits erode instead of working towards the common good and still earning high profits. It's time we sit down at the table and keep single payer national healthcare on it instead of greed. After all almost everybody wins. Isn't that just common sense?