|
Health
Care: Nothing Works and Nobody Cares There is no system of health care in this country. And that's very bad. We are currently the most prosperous and productive nation in the world, but we can't sustain that without a reliably healthy population. Unfortunately, most of us have bad health care. The rest of us have no health care. I'm not talking about your physician. Of course he or she is still there. I'm talking about a system of institutions that gives ordinary people a reasonable level of health at a price they can afford. In this, our country is failing badly. While government and private industry pay lip service to health care, they don't pay anything else. Why fund something as costly as health if you can get individuals to do it for you? Why should government use tax dollars and corporations use profit dollars, when we will pay the costs? I'm very grateful to Bernard Lown's August 1 column in the Boston Globe, "For-profit care's morbid results." It's on the Internet. It provided much of the inspiration for this column, and I commend it to you. There are a number of so-called Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) but I'm sure you recognize that they have nothing to do with health - either restoring it or maintaining it. These are insurance machines designed to take your money and return only a small fraction of it in services. They earn their profits by fulfilling their noble purpose: browbeating hospitals into giving you less when .you visit one. If you pay for your own health insurance, you pay first via your premiums and second by receiving inferior benefits". If you have a preexisting condition or develop a new one that's too costly, you can be darned sure it won't be covered. If your employer pays for your health insurance, that means the HMO convinced your company that it could provide you with inferior coverage and you wouldn't quit. That means lower. premiums charged to your employer, who did not pass the savings on to you in increased wages. Now, while having health insurance is a ripoff, it should. be apparent that not having it is worse. Bad news if you arc one of the 45 million Americans with no health insurance. For example, if you're been outsourced, you work at a big corporation, but not for a big corporation. Oops, no health insurance. You work for Volt or Manpower, organizations that find no profit in insuring you. If you are on Medicare, you probably have little or no insurance. Incredibly, your generous government has given you no allowance for prescription drugs. Even though you worked hard all your life and are one of the most powerful voting blocs in the country, the government won't pay for your prescription drugs. If you are just plain poor, you don't have insurance. Don't worry. The rest of us don't worry about you. And, actually, you will be sick more often and die sooner than the rest of us, so why should we care? I'm probably preaching to the converted. You have already heard about or experienced the flaws in our greed-based health care system. That includes gag rules for doctors, limited hospital stays, limited access to specialists, treatments denied, etc. You know this system is indefensible. What can you do? Not much, I'm afraid. You could write your Congressional representative, but it won't do any good, especially if he or she is a. Republican. You surely know that Republicans love HMO special interest money and don't like concepts like the Patient's Bill of Rights or the idea of patients suing their HMOs. Encourage your doctor to get out of the system. Mine did. Watch the current system implode. Watch the cost of medical treatment continue to rise, while bottom-line-oriented HMOs try to keep profits up. This should result in tragic abuses of patients. Watch the skilled staffs at hospitals be replaced with unmotivated, unskilled employees. This should produce patient deaths. The old excesses of fee-for-service medicine gave way to our current excesses of patient-as-commodity medicine. Now that this model has rotted out, we should look for a new social model for health care: affordable, universal, easy to access - something like the other industrialized nations already have. Is that an entitlement? Not currently, but it will be when we agree that it ought to be. Barry Schoenborn is a technical writer, and an eleven-year resident of Nevada County. You can write to him at barry@wvswrite.com. The opinions of columnists are not necessarily those of The Union. |