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When the Golden Rule Insurance Company rejected her application for health coverage last year, Peggy Robertson was mystified.
“It made no sense,” said Ms. Robertson, 39, who lives in Centennial, Colo. “I’m in perfect health.”
She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified [Denise Grady, "After Caesarean, Some See Higher Insurance Cost," New York Times, 2008.06.01].
Ms. Robertson was doing exactly what my free-market friends says she should do: shop around, look for the best price, keep costs down by consumer choice. But to have a choice, to qualify for coverage from Golden Rule, she would have had to get sterilized. Her mere act of applying for coverage may have hurt her, since insurers red-flag individuals who have been rejected by other companies.
So women get pregnant, sometimes have to undergo C-sections to bring their children into the world safe and healthy, and the free market says, "You're a financial liability; no insurance for you!" Or, as in South Dakota, the insurers smile their free market smiles and offer maternity coverage only at a much higher premium. Remind me: how is this system better than true universal health care? And how would Clinton/RomneyCare that relies on these same scheming private insurers have been any better?
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a somewhat related postscript: The stimulus checks are being credited with a 1% increase in retail sales in May. (But inflation also experienced its biggest jump in six months -- oops.) So the government can borrow $140 billion from our kids and claim credit for boosting the economy. So imagine the boost the economy would get if we switched to Kucinich/Canada-style universal single-payer not-for-profit health care. We spend over $2 trillion a year on health care. Dennis Kucinich, Bill Clinton, and others will tell you that 20% to 30% of private health care dollars go toward paperwork (not to mention pay for lawyers to figure out clever ways to deny coverage to paying customers). Let's be conservative and suppose true universal health care would save us just 10% a year on our national health care expenditures. That would still be $200 billion pumped back into our economy every year, not by deficit spending, but pure savings and sensible public policy.
This is an excellent article on why we should not go to socialized health care.
ReplyDeleteActual Candians talking about their health care.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
My daughter just graduated from college and applied for her own individual health care plan through Blue Cross Blue Shield. She was denied. Her health is perfect, but since she had her tonsils removed two years ago, they denied her and they won't budget on reconsidering the application. There was no health issue, her doctor just felt they should be removed. BCBS told her that if she had lied and left the tonsil operation off her application it would have been approved. Does that make sense?
ReplyDeleteTerry: You might want to cite something other than the slanted conservative propaganda Rudy Giuliani tried citing during his campaign last year. The prostate cancer numbers cited are complete bunk. Care to find a reliable source?
ReplyDeleteAnd you still haven't shown me any Canadians would prefer the American system where perfectly healthy people (like Anon's daughter) can't even get coverage and thus are subject to out-of-pocket costs four times what insurance companies pay.
Okay, first of all, the health care industry can hardly be called "free market." It hasn't been for years.
ReplyDeleteMoney confiscated from us to support "universal" health care won't go back into the economy because it will be a government program. Government programs just take in money.
You want a preview of what "universal" health care will be like in this country? Take a long hard look at the health care veterans get. These are people we supposedly honor for their sacrifices for our country and look how we treat them. What kind of care is the average civilian going to get?
Second, Obama was one of the Senators who thought the stimulus checks were a good idea. So much so that he recently proposed spending another fifty billion on another round of stimulus checks. Let's see, borrow $140 billion from China to buy goods from China, then borrow even more money from China to buy even more stuff from them.
Third, Giuliani is as about as conservative as Bill Clinton.
Hi, Anon!
ReplyDeleteGood that we agree the health care industry is not a free market. At that point, what's to stop us from trying full-tilt government intervention in the form of cheaper and fairer universal health care?
The money does go back into the economy under universal health care, just like it does when the government builds roads and bridges. Give the government $1 trillion dollars for health care, and $980 billion goes for doctors, nurses, drugs, medicine, and other direct health care costs. Give the insurance industry $1 trillion dollars, and up to $300 billion goes to pay for paperwork, billing departments that delay reimbursements so the insurer can earn more interest on our money, and lawyer fees to come up with ever mroe clever denials of service.
Yeah, Obama's not perfect. Of course, McCain voted for the final stimulus bill in Feb., and he is open to more stimulus, too.
Giuliani isn't hardcore like Brownback et al., but the numbers he cited from Terry's article are still bogus conservative propaganda from a Canadian psychiatrist who's found a market for his opinion essays in the conservative American press.
On most issues I'm pretty conservative, but on this one I go about as far to the left as one can and still be in this universe.
ReplyDeleteI think Dennis Kucinich and the former senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, are right on.
The biggest question in my mind would be, "How do we pay for this?" I won't mince words: Taxes. And all at the federal level.
But no new payroll tax. No new value-added tax. In fact, do away with the Social Security payroll tax and the Medicare tax, and simply roll the entire federal budget into a single, progressive income tax. The income tax rates would be higher, especially for the very wealthy, but the paperwork for small businesses would be a lot less, and we'd be rid of the regressive payroll tax. But in any case, no more stealth taxation; be right out in the open about it.
Pitfalls I can see are:
* Displacement of some people in the work force (those involved in medical insurance, medical billing, and all that).
* Possible problems with accountability in the event of a devastating medical error or malpractice (who do you sue?).
* Gaming of the system by people who abuse themselves. And an evil twin: Onerous laws concerning, and maybe even outright monitoring of, unhealthy individual behavior patterns.
* Fraudulent billings and other attempts by service providers to rip off the system.
But I think the good outweighs the bad:
* No more preying on the weak, the sick, the old, and the poor!
* No more battling with insurance companies!
* No more "train wrecks" like the one you describe in the post, Cory!
* No more cannabalistic CEOs!
* No more jumping through hoops every time you move from one state to another -- or simply not moving at all for fear of losing medical coverage!
* No more being locked into a job you hate!
* An end to the barbaric idea that medical care is something to buy and sell!
Okay. End of rant. Call me a radical, now. In this case I will embrace that label with relish.
Once again we focus on a symptom of a problem and not the problem.The immorality of the free enterprise system as practiced in the U.S. is the problem and not health care.Unless you make all doctors and hospitals in this nation government employees and force everyone to use exactly the same system, with no exceptions, the immorality of the system will rapiedly create a two tier health care system. If you have money or other insurance you get care immediately if not, you wait. Includes such things as emergency heart surgery.Lived in the United Kingdom and saw it's health care system and its gotton worse since we were there. If you are willing to wait weeks for emergency health care then that's the system for you. Check how many Canadians come across the border for emergency care. They have a great system if there is nothing seriously wrong with you but prefer ours if they can afford it when an emergency occurs.I have government health insurance through both the Defense Department and the Veterans Administration but give me The Heart Hospital of South Dakota any day, even if I have to pay.Correct the immorality of our present system of free enterprise and you correct almost all of the problems that exist in America today.Problem is, you can't legislate morality and until we once again, as a society accept that right is right and wrong is wrong, that there is no gray area nothing is going to change.Joseph G. Thompson
ReplyDeleteThe gov't has as much or more paperwork involved with anything they run than any insurance company! And who is to guarantee that money paid into a gov't run health care system stays in health care? Anybody remember the "lock box" for Social Security that somehow got unlocked just like Pandora's box as soon as some politicians saw a pot of money sitting there.
ReplyDeleteI talked with someone from Australia. Apparently they have a combination gov't/private insurance. Everybody is covered to some degree by gov't, but if you want better coverage you can buy private insurance also. Maybe that's something to look at.
Nonnie
Nonnie, Erin and I had government health insurance in Canada. We can guarantee we filled out less paperwork in Canada than we do hear to get our private policies. And the numbers show that the private insurers create more bureaucratic overhead than government programs.
ReplyDelete