A Look at the Health Care Question

Back in the mid-90s I was working for a very large health insurance company. I worked in the marketing department. I was a lowly admin, but that lowliness had advantages. The marketing reps who pulled in the big bucks got comfortable with me around them and considered me too lowly to worry about and this allowed them to open up around me. I got to see into the dark heart of big-business health care and it was chilling.

"Sickies" is the term they used. Whenever a company was up for renewal, they would get all kinds of information from the client company and then run through the various records the insurance company had and look for the employees who had expensive and long term illnesses. So, whenever renewal time came, it was gleefully studied how many "sickies" the company had gained over the previous contract year. The more then gained, the higher they could increase the premiums and the bigger the commissions to everyone involved.

You see, that is how big business healthcare works. It's about money. Just like all big businesses, it's about how much the company can make with each contract. Never, not once, have I ever heard of a health insurance company that, when open enrollment time came around and a contract renewed, reduced the cost of the healthcare plan for the employees. It just doesn't happen. That's because the medical costs keep going up, so the company has to charge more to make more money. It's a vicious cycle.

There are those out there who propose that the government create a kind of health care plan that everyone can join. This plan would be either incredibly cheap or cost nothing at all to American citizens. It seems like a basic, fundamental things to most civilized countries around the world, most of whom have some form of socialized medicine. But in this country, we have big powerful health insurance companies and lots and lots of politicians they can buy and those politicians like to use words to scare people.

One word that a recent political candidate for a very high office likes to use is the word bureaucrat. He likes to say that socialized medicine would "put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor." I am not sure what world he has been living in, perhaps one where a man can buy five houses and be worth millions, but the bureaucrats are already in the health care system we have.

What is a bureaucrat? Essentially this is someone who is a low-paid paper-pusher who just happens to work for the government. Well, if we take the basic definition, a paper-pusher, and agree that that is, essentially, what a bureaucrat is, then the health care system as it stand is LOADED with them.

I know. I was one. I pushed a LOT of paper when I worked for that company. I was about a lowly and low-paid as you could get. I was the very definition of a bureaucrat.

There is a paper-pusher who decides how much you pay for your insurance. There are legions of them who root through applications and accept or reject applications. There legions more who decide which doctor you can and cannot see and which network your doctor belongs in. There are legions more who open the mail, read the claims and pass them along to the right person. At this point another paper-pushing company bureaucrat decides if your claim is worth paying and how much and there are legions more who send out more paperwork to the patient and the doctor.

Folks, there are already more bureaucrats between you and your health care than any human being should have to deal with. The fact that they work for a corporation rather than a government doesn't mean a whole helluva lot to the family who has to sit there and look at the checkbook and electric bill, then the fridge and then their sick child and make a choice.

Government should provide the tools to take care of its citizens. It should not force its morality on them or dictate what everyone's morality should be. This is a fundamental key to a free society. Without this, the society is not free.

Therefore a government should provide an infrastructure. It should provide a defense to protect its people from enemies. It should also provide something so that they can get basic, fundamental healthcare.

Those against his like to say that Canada is a mess. That it takes months to see a doctor there. Well, I'd like to know who decided that we HAVE to follow Canada's model? Why don't we take the best parts, the parts that work, from other countries and form the best possible method?

Politicians like to throw around words like "tax credits." This means nothing to the person who cannot afford to pay for health care right now. Just because they get a tax break once a year, doesn't mean much when you want to take the kids to the doctor in August.

The government needs to do one of three things. It needs to provide universal healthcare that is free of charge to its citizens. Or, it needs to provide money that will allow those who cannot afford to pay for insurance to pay for insurance. Or it needs to offer incentives so insurance companies offer health care at no cost to those who cannot afford it.

Since, in each of those cases, it will require paperwork and people to funnel that paperwork from one place to another, you had just better get used to the idea of bureaucrats. Then again, if you ever have been sick, or injured, visited a doctor or been in a hospital, you are already very familiar with them to begin with.