Health Care: Where is the Money Going?
We've all heard about the soaring cost of health care. And that the only solution is for the government to step in. Only through a public option can health care costs be held down, they tell us. But what I don't understand is why costs are rising so much faster than everything else.
A Wall Street Journal article today predicts that without government involvement - as if they aren't involved already - health care costs will amount to nearly 20% of GDP by 2019. This year the tab was $2.5 trillion, or 17.3% of GDP. My question is, why is it going up? I'm not saying it shouldn't, but before we decide it's a job for Uncle Sam, somebody should figure out the driver.
The money has to be coming from somewhere and going somewhere and so far I've heard virtually nothing about either end. And there are really only two possibilities: either a lot more Americans are sick, or it costs a lot more to treat a sick American. Or perhaps its a bit of both. I do know that aging baby boomers will begin to draw more on health care as they grow older. This means that more Americans are getting sick and using the system but it doesn't necessarily mean that the cost of treatment for an individual is going up. So while total cost is going up simply because there are more people using the system, it doesn't mean that each 'unit' of health care costs more.
Talking about something like this in a collective sense bothers me and may well be a sham. In a collective sense everything is going up in cost simply because the population is growing. Total food costs are going up because more people are eating. The total amount of money spent on energy is rising because more people are on the grid. Cell phone costs are rising too because everyone has to have one. And what about death costs? As the population grows more people are dying meaning the total amount of money we spend on boxes, plots, and funerals is going up. So why isn't the government talking about a public option to hold down any of these costs?
Because it isn't about costs. It is about control. And how do you control people? You frighten them, just like lemmings. Scared people will run whatever direction you herd them without stopping to see if there's a cliff. How do you make health care look like a crisis? Why you talk about the total cost of health care. This is the crux of the matter and I urge you to read the next few sentences very carefully to understand the cause and effect at play here. With a growing population of elderly citizens, total costs are rising even though per unit cost is flat or even falling. But people who don't even use the health care system are paying ever higher premiums for their health insurance. So medical costs are not rising. It is insurance costs are rising. Read on.
So why is insurance going up? In a nut shell, because of government meddling. Because thanks to various laws medical insurance doesn't work like every other type of insurance on the planet. Car insurance, life insurance, home owners insurance, you name it, actuarial tables and personal behavior affect the price. You buy a BMW 4000 GTX with the optional 25,000 pound thrust Rolls Royce jet engine and your insurance is going to go up. Buy a house in the hood and your home owners insurance will go up. Open an amusement park and see what liability insurance costs. Decide to take up skydiving or motorcycle racing and see what happens to your life insurance premiums. But for some reason meth-heads and people addicted to food and cigarettes pay the same for their health insurance as health nuts. That's what's driving up costs and spreading the pain to everyone - even those responsible enough to walk up the stairs at work and forgoe that ninth slice of pizza. Somewhere along the way health care became a right! A right that is already being funded through confiscatory taxation except in this case it goes to a private agency.
You want to hold health care costs down? Put market forces back in control. Take all insurance except catastrophic off the table and link the premiums to personal behavior. If no one can afford to go to the doctor, prices at the doctor will have to come down. Because if the doctors have no patients how will they pay for their summer homes, or vacations to Europe, or their kids Ivy League educations? The problem with health care isn't the price, it is the quasi-socialist system currently in place. And adding more government laws is only going to make things worse.
Don't be a lemming. See the cliff! See the idiots driving you towards it!
Futbol Guru, www.not-a-lemming.com