Today for your consideration, let’s discuss what would actually motivate the medical and insurance industries to seek ways to provide better and lower cost products and services.
We can start with what the Health Care Reform proposals proponents claim will bring this about: competition and the opportunity to increase their customer base to expand their business. Oh yes, and the government is going to make them do better. The opposition is no better; they maintian that the marketplace is the proper way to bring lower costs to health care. And as we all know, the Health Care system has already achieved that because it operates as a competitive capitalistic business already. Of course this wouldn’t explain the fact that we have an over-priced and under-performing health care environment that isn’t actually working to provide good health care to the majority of people.

So what are these industries and the government doing wrong today?

Ah, so many thing!

Starting with the easiest groups: the insurance and medical businesses. They are operating according the to exact principles and motivations that any free-market, capitalistic enterprise would and should follow. They are in it to make money for their owners. Even the not-for-profit outfits are often motivated to turn out excellent incomes for their management teams and principle owners. This is what we expect and encourage businesses to do. It is the American way. You are not motivated to provide your products and services for the lowest possible costs because you have to if you want to stay in business. You only have to do that, if there is a competitor who can actually offer your services/products to your customers at a lower price and those customers choose to purchase from those competitors.

Now there are competing insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, and other health care entities; but not necessarily competing to get you the lowest cost. Sometimes they are looking to find groups of customers who are the most profitable, and exclude those who are not. Or they control the drug that is needed under their patents and strive to insure that they keep the profits has high as possible. Hospital and doctors are encouraged to perform tests, procedures and treatments because their compensation is driven by what they sell and do; not by what they achieve for their patients.

It’s not that these companies or people do this because they are bad, wrong or evil. They are Americans working in a system that rewards these business methods. Some companies may on occasion, work with our legislators and governmental agencies to distort the competitive process and the free-market place. We can expect this from general human nature. There are those among us, probably most; who will put their benefiting before that of everyone else. This is in-line with the principle of working for your own self-interest; a very American – capitalistic idea. The motivation isn’t bad; but if it is allowed to distort the free-marketplace and to prevent true competition, then it is destructive to the public interest that we all have in the free democratic society that all Americans claim as their birth-right.

As to the government, Health Care is a touchstone issue that brings out all the worst in the American political process. Our representative Congress-men and -women and our Senators are attempting to craft various versions of a Health Care Reform bill to accommodate the needs and interests of their constituents (and more importantly the lobbyist and special-interest groups that stoke the engines that run their re-election campaigns). The medical and insurance industries (and their well-financed lobbyists and public-relations arms) are raising the alarm on how the ‘best medical system’ in the world could be imperiled, if the politicians are allowed to establish government oversight or controls on our current system. Political parties, strategist, and assorted public groups are seizing the day to grab their share of the 15-minute time-slot. Confusion, ire, vitriol, and stupidity are running rampant throughout the land. So we all need to turn to our elected political leaders for their inspired enlightenment on how to reform Health Care.

Whoa! Wait a minute. Hold on there. Look to our leaders for the answers?

The government’s proposals are going to fix the current problems by expanding the systems and approaches that we fundamentally have now. They are going to require all or more people to have insurance; and that will lower the cost because we will be paying even more money into the insurance companies. They are going to get the insurance, drug and medical businesses to find ways to operate more efficiently avoid waste and eliminate fraud. You know the things they have been doing for years.

I think we may have to consider the government methods further. But for now, I am going to go have a good nights’ rest; dreaming of the wonderland that awaits us after we nibble on the government’s mushrooms (which grow very well in the halls of Congress) and take a hit off that hookah that they burn our tax money in.