A Health Care Travesty

In times of economic downturn, there is a natural tendency to point fingers. Such was the case in Germany during the Great Depression. Among other things, several Jewish citizens held highly visible positions in Germany and Austria…they were wealthy and successful while the rest of the country was suffering. Consequently, they became a scapegoat for their nation’s economic problems, and the subsequent Holocaust is (almost) universally abhorred and has taken its place in history as the ultimate evil. Millions of lives were lost and/or affected.

Certainly nothing can ever compare with the sheer malignancy of the Holocaust and that is why you’ll never see me equate anything else with the term ‘Holocaust’. There is, however a travesty being perpetrated today that has the capacity to affect millions of people’s jobs because of the tendency to project one’s ills onto another entity, real or imagined. That ‘travesty’ is the ‘demonization’ of the insurance industry as the cause of the high cost of our health care system. When health reform first started, it was correctly being called ‘health care reform’. As the real underlying cause of the health care crisis manifested itself-that being the high cost of care in this country—the ‘movement’ was changed to health insurance reform. Ask any politician and they will agree that defensive medicine caused by runaway malpractice lawsuits, a shortage of primary care physicians caused by steadily decreasing Medicare reimbursements, a lack of transparency in the cost of care, billions in uncompensated care at the nation’s hospitals, duplicate and unnecessary testing, coupled with an entitlement mentality of the populace to choose an unhealthy lifestyle but not have to pay for it, are the real causes of the skyrocketing costs. However, it is much more palatable (and politically safe) to throw the blame at an entity that people love to hate…just give them a reason to. Such is the case with insurance companies. What would we do without insurance companies? In a few words, pay for our own dang healthcare. If we paid for it ourselves, we might have an incentive to lay off the bon-bons and get a little exercise. Much has been made about the ‘uninsured’, with some claiming 47 million Americans are ‘uninsured’. After taking out people that could qualify but just don’t want it (wealthy families, people that qualify for government programs but haven’t signed up, people between jobs that are in their waiting periods, college students who would rather buy beer than insurance, or illegal immigrants who want to stay below the radar and who know that hospitals can’t legally report them to INS) the true figure is closer to 12 million people or 4-5% of Americans. If only a fraction of the trillion or so dollars being bandied about were put to insuring those people and were coupled with common-sense reforms such as tort reform and wellness programs, we could solve our healthcare crisis.

But the those pushing for health insurance reform would have you believe that the insurance companies are the root of all our health care woes. “Greedy insurance companies” has become the new mantra to rail against. Consider this- insurance companies have a 3% profit margin on average. People don’t see that; if they do, they inevitably exclaim that 3% of the total premiums taken in is a huge number. Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s take out ALL of the insurance companies’ profits and throw it back into the cost of health care. The result would be that the American system of health care would survive another 36 hours. That’s right. ALL of the health insurance companies’ profits combined would fund the health care monstrosity for another 36 hours.

But it’s such an easy target.