Our health care is killing us

I read a book by Twin Cities author Vince Flynn over the weekend called Term Limits. The book starts with the assassinations of four venal members of Congress. That didn’t surprise me so much as the reported sentiments of many of the characters of the book that killing four was a good start. I found it abhorrent, of course, that this would be acceptable, even in fiction.

But, the more I thought of Tom Delay, Bill Frist, and hell, even Jim Oberstar’s packing of the pork barrel, I began to wonder less about the motivations of the fictional assassins and turned my attention to thinking how it is that we continue to elect these sorts of people who are not at all serious about the problems facing our country. It’s completely about how much pork can I bring home, and how much money can I raise to run re-election ads telling the people how scared they ought to be about the gay married terrorists.

Forget global warming for a minute, the war were fighting in Iraq instead of against Al Qaida, the disaster in New Orleans, the Plame affair, and look at what’s happening here that government has the absolute power to fix.

Northwest Airlines is in bankruptcy. General Motors is headed there. Wal-Mart is reviled even more than it deserves (and that’s a lot) when its measures to control its health care costs leak out.

Clearly NWA and GM have been mismanaged for a long time. (A Japanese friend told me a long time ago the difference between GM and Toyota is that GM recruits the best MBAs and Toyota recruits the best engineers.) But the thing NWA, GM and Wal-Mart have in common is their increasing cost of providing health insurance for their workers–a cost that in every other industrialized nation falls on the government.

Any first year college economics student can easily pin point what’s wrong with the American system of leaving health care in private hands. The health care companies spend huge amounts of money disqualifiying people from benefits. As I’m sure billionaire Bill McGuire of United Health Care can tell you, he didn’t get that way by taking care of sick people. In his defense, what business in its right mind would want to insure sick people? They just get sick, and that means you have to pay out instead of just collect premiums.

Sure, you end up insuring some sick people when you insure the big groups, like Wal-Mart, GM and NWA, but you can raise premiums at will to take care of it. Actually insuring a big group is a much better deal, because the law of big numbers assure that you can always make a profit because you can calculate with astonishing accuracy what your odds are and set the prices accordingly. These guys are way better at that than Vegas.

Of course, that leaves the working poor who don’t have benefits, the people who lose their jobs because they get sick, the old who don’t have jobs–in other words, all the people who are at risk for being sick–in the hands of the government. And that government doesn’t have anything effective in place to actually provide any preventative care. The sick just fall onto Medicaid and Medicare, which pays a fixed rate for services below market rate. And so the true costs just get shifted back to those who can pay, in the form of higher premiums.

So, the poor get screwed. The middle class who pays for at least a portion of their own benefits get screwed…and hell, even the rich get screwed. Everybody gets screwed except Congress, which provides itself lifetime extensive benefits while they screw the rest of us.

Maybe all those big corporation presidents who are seeing their own companies and workers sacrificed to the lobbyists will come to their senses one of these days and start putting some of their own health care dollars into lobbying Congress to straighten out this mess.

I hope it doesn’t come to Vince Flynn’s proposed solution before then. But I won’t hold my breath. I’ll leave that to Flynn’s snipers.