Let’s put human faces on the health insurance discussion. People suffer and die every day that they have no access to health care. Until Medicare kicked in, I could have been one of those people. Delay? Let’s all get in the same boat. How about everybody forfeit all health insurance coverage until we find a way to provide it for everyone? Compromise? For the love of Pete, what do you think took all those reams of the Affordable Care Act? Someone, quick, introduce legislation replacing the ACA with single payer insurance for EVERYONE. Here’s an op-ed I wrote almost 5 years ago. Cause of Death: No Health Insurance By Joan C. Browning Mountain Messenger January 3, 2009 Soon after the November election, another Greenbrier County citizen succumbed to treatable illness. Without health insurance or a fat bank account medical care was not available, and so this citizen lived the last months knowing that the people in Greenbrier County, and West Virginia, and the United States of America, accepted this death by lack of health insurance. 250,000 West Virginians have no health insurance. 5,000 of those live in Greenbrier County. No health insurance is the cause of death of 250 Mountaineers a year. 6 or 7 of those deaths are in Greenbrier County. Isn’t denying our neighbors life-saving medical services is a sin? At least a sin of omission? Or is it is murder? Is indifference a murder weapon? All of us buy health insurance. Our taxes buy health insurance for the poor through Medicaid, the elderly and disabled through Medicare, government employees, military retirees, the children’s health insurance program and a myriad of other government health insurance programs. As consumers, we buy health insurance for employees of businesses and for union workers. Rampant greed is destroying our health care system. People want more health care than they pay for. We elect public officials who promise to shift the costs of our health care to somebody else Cost shifting distorts market forces and patient responsibility. The government expands services and decides how much to pay providers. The rest of the cost is shifted to patients covered by private insurance. Private insurance passes on the cost of subsidizing government programs to its customers, until increased rates drive more and more people and companies into the uninsured column. Finally the cost is shifted to medical providers and to uninsured patients. The greed ethos boils down to saying to the uninsured “you pay for my care and if you run out of money, you just go without health insurance.” It says to medical providers, “you owe me below-cost health care.” As Steve Roberts, president of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce said, “Any time the public sector underpays, either in Medicare, Medicaid or PEIA, then that gets made up somewhere and it tends to be made up by private sector insurance.” Private insurance costs so much in part because the government isn’t paying its share. The United States spent $2.1 trillion, or $7,026 per person, on health care in 2006. Every person who paid less than their share depended on others to make up the difference. How do we repair our health care system? Let’s start by rationalizing payment schemes. Insurance is based on the premise that we all pay premiums into a “risk pool.” Unlucky folks get sick and thus take out more benefits than they pay into the pool. The lucky ones enjoy better health and pay for more medical care than they use. When a person complained at a public meeting that the patient portion of a colonoscopy cost $150, I almost fell out of my chair. As an uninsured person, my most recent colonoscopy had cost me $5,200. When I experienced new and frightening symptoms a few months ago, I spent four hours in the Greenbrier Valley Medical Center emergency room. Well trained professionals performed diagnostic blood tests and CT scans and x-ray with very modern equipment. Well trained physicians interpreted the results and prescribed remedies. When the Gallop polling person phoned to ask about my satisfaction with the care I received, I practically gushed – everything was above expectation. The full charge for all services came to $5,367. Medicare cut this immediately by “approving” $1,097, or 20% of the charges. Then Medicare paid $815, or 15% of charges. I then paid $282, or 5% of charges. The medical providers had to write off the remaining 80%. Last year, as an uninsured person, I would have paid $5,367.27 instead of $282.24. All that excellent service was worth more than $1,097. What does a CT machine cost? Millions, I’d guess. How about adequate compensation for the physician and all those professionals? The emergency room physician charged $389 for 4 hours. Medicare approved $162, or 42% and paid $129, or 34%. My share was $32.36, or 8%. The physician donated 58% of full charges, $227. The physician was paid $161 for 4 hours, or $40 an hour. Compare this to the $78 an hour of pay and benefits of United Automobile Workers. When Medicare shifted 80% of the cost of my emergency room experience, health insurance became unaffordable for others -- maybe the citizen whose lack of health insurance was the cause of death a month ago. May the Almighty and the uninsured forgive us. And may we earn that forgiveness by beginning immediately to heal the health care system.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 14:52:43 +0000
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