A recent NY Times article documents curiosity from Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Michael Leavitt, about the Swiss and Dutch methods for dispensing health care. Before I get on my soapbox, let me say that I’m encouraged by Leavitt’s interest and willingness to truly become a student of his trade — even at the expense of giving up some credibility in doing so. We clearly need to be observing the inner-workings of every system out there and adopt the best, most feasible practices for our own health care system.
Canada and England have single-payer (socialized) systems paid for by the government. The Netherlands and Switzerland on the other hand, force individuals to buy their own private health insurance, and subsidize the poor. The latter resembles Massachusetts’ new system of forced insurance. Ok, so you force insurance companies, which (sad but true) are for-profit enterprises in the business of underwriting catastrophic risk, to insure EVERYONE…even the people that wouldn’t be good investments (people with expensive, chronic health problems - again, sad but true). What’s the result? The price of healthcare not only remains artificial…passing through a labyrinth of smoke and mirrors we’ve all come to know from large insurers, it also goes up. The minute you make something like insurance, where actuaries are working tirelessly using all types of fancy statistical models to assess risk/reward, mandatory — it gets more expensive for everyone. If we adopted a plan like this, the politicians whose names happened to be slapped on the Bill would get credit for propagating legislation for “universal health care.” You hear that? Everyone has health insurance? Aren’t we heroes? Never mind that it’s ridiculously expensive and only provides the most basic form of coverage…
When you change a profitable business model with Big Brother-like legislation (never mind that the business model is already cold and cruel), you force the costs to be borne by the end-user. Everyone’s premiums go up, and they go up dramatically. You haven’t captured any value. The Swiss and the Dutch don’t have employer-based health coverage…it’s all done through the individual. Well, most companies in the U.S. who provide health insurance as a benefit, must defray those costs somehow - and it’s certainly not the shareholders who will bear the brunt of this expense. The expenses are borne by the employees in the form of lower wages. They have to be. It’s still a zero-sum game. And if they aren’t borne by the employees, they come in the form of higher prices whatever type of widgets that company sells. It all trickles down to the end-user somehow. How then, is private universal health care better than government universal health care?? Forced private insurance is, in fact, slightly better than full-blown socialized medicine - there’s less governmental interference. Less sand in the transmission. Less wasted money. Perhaps less corruption.
I can, however, see one benefit to peeling insurance off of employers and having consumers buy it directly — people will have a greater awareness of how much regular PPO or HMO health insurance actually costs…and they may learn to manage their risk better. Put another way - they might be healthier. And that helps everyone, doesn’t it?
Canada and England have single-payer (socialized) systems paid for by the government. The Netherlands and Switzerland on the other hand, force individuals to buy their own private health insurance, and subsidize the poor. The latter resembles Massachusetts’ new system of forced insurance. Ok, so you force insurance companies, which (sad but true) are for-profit enterprises in the business of underwriting catastrophic risk, to insure EVERYONE…even the people that wouldn’t be good investments (people with expensive, chronic health problems - again, sad but true). What’s the result? The price of healthcare not only remains artificial…passing through a labyrinth of smoke and mirrors we’ve all come to know from large insurers, it also goes up. The minute you make something like insurance, where actuaries are working tirelessly using all types of fancy statistical models to assess risk/reward, mandatory — it gets more expensive for everyone. If we adopted a plan like this, the politicians whose names happened to be slapped on the Bill would get credit for propagating legislation for “universal health care.” You hear that? Everyone has health insurance? Aren’t we heroes? Never mind that it’s ridiculously expensive and only provides the most basic form of coverage…
When you change a profitable business model with Big Brother-like legislation (never mind that the business model is already cold and cruel), you force the costs to be borne by the end-user. Everyone’s premiums go up, and they go up dramatically. You haven’t captured any value. The Swiss and the Dutch don’t have employer-based health coverage…it’s all done through the individual. Well, most companies in the U.S. who provide health insurance as a benefit, must defray those costs somehow - and it’s certainly not the shareholders who will bear the brunt of this expense. The expenses are borne by the employees in the form of lower wages. They have to be. It’s still a zero-sum game. And if they aren’t borne by the employees, they come in the form of higher prices whatever type of widgets that company sells. It all trickles down to the end-user somehow. How then, is private universal health care better than government universal health care?? Forced private insurance is, in fact, slightly better than full-blown socialized medicine - there’s less governmental interference. Less sand in the transmission. Less wasted money. Perhaps less corruption.
I can, however, see one benefit to peeling insurance off of employers and having consumers buy it directly — people will have a greater awareness of how much regular PPO or HMO health insurance actually costs…and they may learn to manage their risk better. Put another way - they might be healthier. And that helps everyone, doesn’t it?
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