This illuminating interview also illustrates why so many are signing up for medical tourism, which has huge consequences for the environment and deprives locals of basic care because their doctors cater to spoiled people from wealthy nations.
http://www.ecohearth.com/eco-blogs/small-earth/442-the-hidden-costs-of-medical-tourism.html
"Is it wrong for the head of a life insurance company to sit tapping his keyboard hoping that 80% of his policy holders don't die? This is how insurance works."
Which is precisely why insurance should have never got into medicine to begin with. As I say in my own article in the <a href="http://johnsonvillepress.com/2009/07/fatherly-governance-carl-peter-klapper/">Johnsonville Press</a>, on the broader topic of "Fatherly Governance":
"Health care has no business being a business. Health care is an almost exclusively local emergency and preventative service. To require that it meet business objectives is both absurd and cruel. Yet that is precisely what health insurance has done."
My alternative, as my subject line suggests, is Municipal Medical Departments or MMDs. These would operate alongside the fire and police departments, providing service directly (call it the "no payer" or "direct provision" model) to all comers. Instead of being primarily concerned with cost-cutting, the MMDs would be concerned with healing the sick and injured. Nonetheless, because MMDs will also not be concerned about profits and retaining executives producing those profits, they will be providing medical service at a significantly reduced cost.
The doctors will be on the staff, at hospitals, clinics and for house calls, relieved of the burden of billing, claims and the threat of litigation from so-called "malpractice" suits. Their education will be provided through expanded state medical colleges (with the role of the police and fire academies) and internships at the hospitals. Cost savings in paying for doctors will thus be immense with MMDs. The beneficiary of that will be the taxpayer, since the establishment of the MMDs will have shifted the cost of medical care from the patient to the local and state governments.
Keep up the good work. You and the founder of united patients of America have a lot in common. She was on the receiving end, you were on the other. Perhaps together you can make the difference.
Yes, thank you Mr. Potter for finally coming to your senses after 20 years in the business. May I ask -- what took so long? Also, where are your former coworkers?
- Michael
Mr. Potter,
I appreciate your argument about George Will's column, but I encourage you to be more careful in your own claims, especially given your desire to "call out misleading statements and statistics." You write "chances are [Mr. Will] has stashed enough away that he can afford to shell out the nearly $13,000 that the average annual premium for decent family coverage costs these days... The median household income in this country is just about $50,000. I’m betting it has been a few years since Will faced paying more than a fourth of his family’s annual income—before taxes—just to cover the health insurance premiums." But the dollar amounts that you're comparing come from groups that aren't comparable. The "average annual premium" you reference is not an average across all families; it is for a family of four, and median income households are more likely to only have three people in them. I'm also guessing that the "average" annual premium is a mean, not a median, and while I don't expect that the mean and median health insurance costs vary as much as the mean and median incomes, it's still not clear to me that it's appropriate to compare a mean cost with a median income. You also shift from families (for the premium cost) to households (for income); families and households are not equivalent, as the members of a household need not be related. I agree with your overall argument, and the general thrust should still be true if you use more accurate comparisons (although probably a bit less dramatic). If you're sloppy about these kinds of category shifts, though, you're telling Mr. Will and others that it's OK for them to be sloppy too. And of course for some people, it may not be sloppiness; it may be a purposeful decision to mislead others by shifting among non-interchangeable categories while glossing over the fact that the categories aren't interchangeable. Thanks for your work. I was glad to see your interview with Bill Moyers, which is what lead me here. We need more people to join you in speaking out.
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