I was just out on Facebook and one of the posts asked whether we supported healthcare reforms. This is interesting because it only asked one side of the question and that is whether we support healthcare reform which most of us do, or what’s being proposed.
In the title I compare healthcare and the netbook. I think I see a little bit of this in our present situation. The current group of notebooks had gotten to the place where there were big bulky and loaded with features and software that a lot of people would never use but you had to pay for it anyway so they weren’t as affordable as a basic package could be. So we designed the netbook. It is small, light, easy to carry, easy to understand, affordable for just about everyone, available from anywhere and is as close to a computer Volkswagen as anything we ever seen. This is sort of the people’s computer. It has enough function, enough power, enough screen, and is capable of doing the overwhelming majority of what people want to do on a day-to-day basis.
Basic healthcare should be a little like that. We shouldn’t have to worry about it while switching jobs, or if we’ve an existing condition, or if we are moving to a new state, etc. The costs for a procedure should be the same regardless of how we’re paying for it, not something negotiated or dictated by an insurance company or government entity. It should be a fair price that we all understand and covers the cost and compensation fairly. Yes there are these and other items that need to be addressed as our society changes from one that has most health care insurance provided by employers and has created holes for those who are between jobs. Fixing the problems does not require swatting flies with a sledgehammer, it may be more difficult to actually work this out correctly but it is what’s necessary.
Many of the things that have driven up the cost of healthcare such as lack of tort reform, lack of competition across state lines, and very high costs for many of the drugs we use are not being addressed by current proposals. So while we wait for reform we are in the process of building a bigger bureaucracy that in itself will cost more, doing nothing to reduce the cost of healthcare, and in many ways just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There will be things that go beyond the scope of basic health care. Things like organ transplants and other major procedures. These can be dealt with through some kind of catastrophic coverage and be outside the basic coverage system. Just as the gaming notebook that costs an order of magnitude more than a netbook covers a special need that a small group requires, we don’t make everyone buy a gaming computer in case they want to play a game someday.
Going back to my comparison between the netbook and healthcare reform it would seem that we should be able to come up with a system that is somewhat inexpensive, provides most of our basic healthcare needs, and is available on a general basis. I think we can do this without several thousands of pages of regulation coming through Congress. I am a firm believer that any bill that is so complicated that a high school graduate can’t read and understand what is in it, is not a bill that we that we should ever consider.
Current proposals are just that. They are so big and so complicated that the people who represent us and who have to vote on these proposals have indicated (and this is from both sides) that they have not really had a chance to read them or understand them but they are hot to trot to pass them or shoot them down.
Until we can come up with a healthcare system proposal that is as functional as a netbook then I think we need to keep working on it. In the meantime we have the netbook and a flawed but reasonably functioning healthcare system.