If we treat U.S. health care like any other sector of the economy, it is doing fine. Investor return is up. So is CEO compensation and shareholder value. It lacks competition, though, which leads to low customer satisfaction – which could be the understatement of the century so far.
We had a recent letter from a Durango woman who said she got a physical with a vaccination, from a physician who works under Centura Health, which also operates Mercy Regional Medical Center. She was shocked to be billed $1,273 “after insurance discounts.”
Herald reporter Mary Shinn recently wrote about Coloradans skipping health care because of high costs. Durangoans Jan and Greg Phillips, in their early 60s, said they are paying more than $24,000 a year for coverage with a $13,000 deductible. Jan said she’d like to see Medicare for all.
National Public Radio has been running a monthly segment on health care bills. This week, it featured a Florida woman, Jeannette Parker, a wildlife biologist who fed a stray cat, which bit her finger. She went to an emergency room to get preventive treatment for rabies, and was content – until she got a bill for $48,512.
The crazy thing is that these stories are becoming less newsworthy. The other crazy thing is that they represent a market-based system run amok.
So why are we still stuck fighting over the Affordable Care Act, which sought to strengthen health care markets and which was partly sold to the public as a way to ensure hospitals got paid?
The New York Times had a story the other day that offered some clues. The health care and insurance industries, it reported, “have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill Medicare for all... before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item.”
Spearheading the effort is Lauren Crawford Shaver, who was last seen as a top official in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Whatever that transition should be called, it is not ironic. It was Clinton who argued for Obamacare against the single-payer system Bernie Sanders pushed.
“We have a structure that frankly works for most Americans,” Charles N. Kahn III, the president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents investor-owned hospitals, told The Times.
Perhaps Kahn has a better sense of how most Americans feel about their access to health care than most Americans do, but we are doubtful.
The new army of lobbyists, called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that “Medicare for all will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients.”
If this sounds familiar, it should. The arguments “echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health plan in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago,” The Times observed. It is Lucy with the football over and over again.
When do we get to the point where we say that we have tried reforming health care markets and it has not worked to provide better access?
The 2020 presidential primaries are a year off but the issues are important now because this is when the sorting starts. It is when you see headlines such as “Amy Klobuchar doesn’t think America is ready for Medicare for all and free college yet.”
This is when supporters of real reform can say we are ready. If children can demand that California Sen. Dianne Feinstein support the Green New Deal, a vague cynosure, and be hailed for their courage, think how much more informed adults could do to shape the debate about health care.
The time is now. On Wednesday, progressive Democrats introduced a new, sweeping single-payer bill in the U.S. House. We’ll look at what’s in it and the fight ahead in Monday’s Herald.
