Spending more to get less: health care in America

The New York Times recently featured a hard-hitting article about the stark choice that American voters face between Obama's vision of health care and that of Romney.

Stark choice my ass.

Obamacare used Mitt's Massachusetts health care reforms as a template for Obamacare, a fact that even hard-core Tea Party types don't deny. The only reason that there is any difference between the candidates positions today is because the Governor has disavowed what he accomplished when he was governor, mainly to placate that same Tea Party wing of the GOP.

In a nutshell, both the Mass plan and Obamacare preserve the status quo, with the additional sop to the health care industry of subsidizing insurance for anyone who can't afford it. The fact that the passage of Obamacare sparked a flurry of buy-outs among health care providers and insurers, a topic we've touched on here before, signals that the industry understands very well that their gravy train is bound for an even more lucrative ride through the pockets of the American consumer.

PBS has an informative article that explores some of the reasons that other developed countries manage to deliver superior health care (when measured by outcome indicators) at substantially lower costs, without excluding the poorest third of their populations.

The stark choice is not between Obama and Romney. It's between Obamney and a single-payer public system.

Why this is not immediately obvious even to near-cretins speaks to the efficacy of the industry's propaganda machine. When private for-profit corporations are responsible for deciding who gets what services, their bottom line is their bottom line. In other words, what you actually need is not.

By definition they need to make a profit. They don't make a profit by providing expensive medical treatments to every policy holder who gets sick.

Research consistently shows that countries with government run health care achieve better results for more people using less resources. The evidence has been around for decades and is indisputable.

But it flies in the face of the great American myth that the private sector is inherently more efficient than government.

The American public is paying the private sector a 40% premium to keep that myth alive.

Private practice doctors going under in bankruptcy epidemic

Parija Kavilanz has a story on CNN today about doctors going broke.

And they're going broke alright. The little guys who run their offices like independent businesses are getting the screw-over from both ends.

On the government side, what's covered under medicare and medicade seems to be shrinking month by month. On the other side, the prices for routine stuff they've always passed on to patients at or near cost is skyrocketing.

And the one constant is that liability insurance premiums can be counted on to go up year after year.

Let's take a step back here and try to focus on the big picture. Who is putting the squeeze on your local clinic?

Insurers. Insurance companies have to make money. Otherwise they won't be around. Private health insurance companies have a dilema. Every penny they spend on your cancer treatment is a penny taken away from their bottom line. And they care way more about that bottom line than they care about your cancer treatment.

Not because they're nasty people. Just because without a profit, they'd all be unemployed.

Drug companies. Back in the day the medicine man got his power from being able to offer up concoctions that made sick people better. Or promise to. Today the new medicine men, the pharmaceutical companies, get their power from being able to offer up concoctions that make sick people better. Or promise to.

Power today is measured in dollars. The drug companies want to maximize their power. You've got cancer. We've got the miracle drug. What are you willing to pay?

There's the reason your friendly neighborhood clinic is going bankrupt. They're caught in the squeeze as the big players in the health care business maximize their profits.

Step back a bit and ask yourself this question: should health care ever be about maximizing profits?

While you're tightening your belt CEO salaries rise 30 to 40%

Financial consulting firm GMI Ratings released their findings for executive compensation in 2010. They found that on average, CEO compensation year over year has increased up to 40%.

So while you are figuring out how best to break the news to the kids that they'll be living in shipping crates under a bridge real soon, the big dogs, the six and seven figure a year guys, are giving themselves handsome raises.

And here's a little food for thought; three of the top ten CEO pay packets in America last year went to guys (yes, they were all guys) in the health care business.

There's a moral dilema in the health care business that we don't like to talk about. If the health care company is making oodles of money, why isn't it spending that money providing health care? After all, there's a ton of folks in America who need health care they don't get. Obviously, the less actual health care a health care provider provides, the more money they will make.

When three of the top earning CEOs in America come from the health care sector, you know an awful lot of folks had to go without health care to put them there.

The top banana made $145 million in 2010. About a thousand people missed out on heart by-pass surgery to make that happen.

The health care business. Shouldn't that be an oxymoron?

How I convinced Romney of the wisdom of single-payer health care

I had no idea that this guy I was talking to in the Early Bird Cafe in Grand Bend was the future governor of Massachusetts, let alone a presidential candidate.

But he'd helped me out with a battery boost a couple of days before, and I'd helped him boost Seamus the Irish Setter into the doggie cage on the roof of his car, so when we accidentally met up at the Early Bird a few days later it was like we were old pals.

Waves and hey howya doin's all round. We took the table right next to him and his 15 or so kids, and like it goes in little restaurants we got to chatting a bit.

As it happened, my Missus of the time was very obviously "with child" as they say, and at some point Mitt and his lovely wife Ann said something about hope you're ready for the expense. We were baffled.

They were obviously concerned for us. This would be our first, and they had quite a gaggle going already, so many in fact that when they came up from Boston they had to put the dog on the roof of the car. But the expense?

What expense?

Turns out every time Ann went into the delivery room to pop out another young 'un, they got a bill for a thousand bucks. I'm listening to this, eyeballing his brood, taking up pretty much the entire dining room, and thinking holy cow, this man's highly motivated to make some serious dollars.

I explained to them that up here, there's no worries. Couple of teens rub the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) body parts together, and nine months later they don't get a bill, they get free delivery!

Mitt and Ann seemed mightily impressed by this. I can see why. Would have saved them about twenty grand based on what I saw at the Early Bird.

So I wasn't completely surprised when Mitt trotted out the universal health care once he became governor. Didn't quite have the balls to make it true single-payer, but he came as close as America has ever got.

Love it or hate it, I'm the guy who gave him the idea.