Get Real on Health Care

Get Real on Health Care



ROGER COHEN
Published: September 13, 2009

NEW YORK — Some of my summer in France was spent listening to indignant outbursts about U.S. health care reform. The tone: “You must be kidding! What’s there to debate if 46.3 million Americans have no health insurance?”


I think the French are right. I don’t think there’s much to debate when France spends 11 percent of its gross domestic product on health care and insures everyone and the United States spends 16.5 percent of G.D.P. and leaves 20 percent of adults under 65 uninsured. The numbers don’t lie: The U.S. system is wasteful and unjust.

It’s not just the numbers. It’s the intangibles. Two of my children were born in Paris — a breeze. One of them got very sick on arrival in the United States — and my wife fainted in a doctor’s office from the anxiety of finding the appropriate care (when we did, at the eleventh hour, it was excellent). The American health system is an insidious stress-multiplier whose hassles, big and small, permeate already harried lives.

more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/opinion/14iht-edcohen.html?ref=opinion

:dem:

-Laelth

...whose hassles, big and small, permeate already harried lives.

MOST. TRUTHFUL. STATEMENT. EVER.

the insurance industry is in the business of DENYING claims and DELAYING claim payments.

therefore, they have a huge profit motive to erect barriers and create hassles to do just that.

they deny claims they KNOW they are supposed to pay simply to make you work for it.
they require doctors to fill out "letters of medical necessity" forms that are 100% redundant with the prescriptions they already wrote. again, simply to make life difficult for those who cost them money.

the sole purpose of these hurdles in PAYING the insureds is PRECISELY TO BE *INEFFICIENT* in PAYING, because they profit from this.


so many people cling to the simplistic notion that the private sector is inherently more efficient than the government, as if it were some tautology, simply because they read it in a textbook or because it serves their political argument. the truth of the matter, unsurprisingly, more complicated and you have to look at the whole picture.

to make things just a bit more broad, the private sector is more efficient at serving a price-restricted market; the government is more efficient at serving the complete community. the private sector is more efficient at doing things that bring money in (which includes delivery quality, or at least the appearance of quality), and more inefficient at paying money out.

insurance claim payments are a great example of inefficiencies in the private sector.