US Health Care Problems Rooted in Private Sector, Despite Right-Wing Claims

http://www.truth-out.org/us-health-care-problems-rooted-private-sector-despite-right-wing-claims/1311347944

A recent report by McKinsey and Company was seized upon by opponents of health care reform to create a new myth: that President Obama’s health insurance reform (the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- PPACA) will cause huge numbers of employers to drop health insurance coverage that they currently provide for employees.

The McKinsey study was soon shown to be worthless, and McKinsey itself acknowledged that it “was not intended as predictive economic analysis.” But the myth seems to not be completely dead yet. For a more reasonable estimate of the impact of the health insurance reform, we can look to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. They estimated that the number of people (including family members) covered by employment-based insurance would be about 1.8 percent fewer in 2019, as a result of the PPACA legislation. Of course, this is more than counter-balanced by the fact that the percentage of the (non-elderly) population with insurance would increase from 82 to 92 percent – the main purpose of the reform.

Right-wingers, insurance companies, and other opponents of health care reform in the United States are always looking for ways to blame the government for the failures of our health care system. But the simple truth is that they have it backwards: our problems with health care are firmly rooted in the private sector. That is why the average high-income country – where government is vastly more involved in health care – spends half as much per person on health care as we do, and has better health outcomes.

That is why even Medicare – which has to pay for health care services and drugs at costs inflated by our dysfunctional private health care sector – has still proven to be much more efficient than private insurance. As Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman recently pointed out, from 1969 -2009, Medicare spending per person rose 400 percent, adjusted for inflation; private insurance premiums, also adjusted for inflation, rose 700 percent.

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Let's give these profit hungry bastards, who don't perform surgeries, invent any drugs, take blood pressure readings, or even empty a goddamn bedpan, the right to a guaranteed fucking percentage of your income. Let's let them use the IRS as their collection agency muscle against the saps and suckers and marks who we used to call US citizens. Let's give this arrangement three generations or so -the usual interval between major reworkings of national Grand Bargains like Social Security- to work out, and let's just see if our national life expectancy doesn't start to fly in reverse, as in the Russian Federation after the collapse of communism. Then maybe we'll finally be able to admit this was a shitty idea and throw off the bloodsucking bastards in a supreme act of national will. But, on the other hand, maybe the host will be too weak from the blood loss inflicted by the parasite to be able to lift a finger against them.