By Jack E. Lohman
Nobody questions that our health care system is broken, but they argue about how to fix it. Let’s get some things straight.
First, politicians prefer “the free market” even though it is the free market that took over in 1994 that has gotten us into today’s mess. They favor “privatization” because, they argue, it “adds competition and controls costs.”
That’s pure hogwash. It does neither.
Politicians prefer privatization for one and only one reason: private companies can give campaign contributions and public entities cannot. Just ask those who pocket the money from the insurance and healthcare industries but never get a penny from Medicare.
Or ask industry shill Rep. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa), who was “shocked and offended” when someone at her recent anti-Healthy Wisconsin tirade in Burlington questioned her industry loyalty.
Politicians know why they prefer privatization, and you should too. The free market makes them money and Healthy Wisconsin doesn’t. They can be “shocked and offended” all they want, but they perpetuate and participate in our very corrupt political system. In fact, they like it that way.
Health care costs have risen at 5% per year, yet insurance premiums have risen by 87% since 2000. Premiums include not only healthcare costs — which insurers have little control of — but often as much profit as they can add on to help offset losses from Katrina, Rita, Florida, and now, the California fires. It’s another form of cost-shifting to patients.
But in the healthcare market, insurers are unnecessary middlemen that drain nearly one third of our healthcare costs without ever laying hands on the patient. And they are protected by the politicians whose campaigns they help fund.
We don’t need mandated insurance — as Massachusetts has done and some politicians support – we need mandated health care, and we must totally eliminate the 31% industry waste from the system.
Of course, the best way to protect privatized health care is to criticize “government controlled” medicine as being terrible, even when Medicare is the most efficient and popular public-private venture ever. And to call it a budget-buster even when it is the least costly option, or to call it “socialized medicine” even when the hospitals and physicians are the same ones we are using today.
Call it anything, but conflicted politicians won’t call Healthy Wisconsin the best solution for the state. They always remember where those campaign funds came from, and they are not from the government folks. That’s the way our political system works.
Medicare isn’t perfect, and it clearly must reign in abuse and overuse. But the private system has even more abuse and overuse because the penalties are far less than those at the federal level. Again we can point to lawmakers who are unwilling to buck the industry and fix the system.
Simple things like reinstalling the certificate of need would prohibit hospitals from overbuilding beds and upgrading technology before its useful life has run out. And then hiring physicians who feel obligated or are pressured to unnecessarily admit patients or order tests to protect the hospital’s bad investments.
This was a common-sense policy that, when eliminated by political pressure, allowed hospitals to enter the costly open-heart surgery marketplace even when such care was adequately covered nearby.
Hospitals, doctors, and the insurance industry are fighting reform. Yet, in the end, they will all fall to the corporations who are picking up the tab today. They will, out of necessity, move employee healthcare into co-ops and drastically limit their costs. And, incidentally, the profits currently enjoyed by the inefficient system.
Vukmir touts her nursing career, and having employed nurses for 25 years I can attest to their vocalness. But that does not automatically translate to good political judgement. Most if not all of Vukmir’s patients had insurance, and it’s unlikely that they were the uninsured patients Healthy Wisconsin would benefit. As a nurse, Vukmir should stand down on this issue.
