MIA SULLIVAN
Perspectives Assistant
Many people point to excessive defense spending as the cause for our mounting national debt. What some forget, however, is that excessive healthcare spending is also eating away at our nation’s economy.
In 2007, U.S. state and local governments spent $864.2 billion on healthcare and $681.2 billion on defense. According to an article in the New York Review of Books, “in 1960 … healthcare was only 5.2 percent of the GDP. Now that the share of healthcare in the economy has more than tripled, so has the waste.” Our nation is undergoing a healthcare crisis.
Democratic candidates have noticed that our healthcare situation is less than ideal, primarily because
thousands of Americans don’t have health insurance. According to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s, D-N.Y., official campaign Web site, her “American Health Choices Plan covers all Americans and improves healthcare by lowering costs and improving quality.”
The reason for the mounting costs and inefficiencies of healthcare is the fact that health insurance really does not exist. The original concept of health insurance was that an individual would pay a company a monthly rate and that insurance company would cover that individual if he or she had to undergo a costly operation. Now our health insurance system is virtually a third-party payer system: we pay the insurance company a flat rate per month and it “takes care” of the costs of our visits to the doctor.
This third-party payer system creates waste because it employs a middleman that simply transfers money from one group of people to another and takes a large chunk of it in the process. It would be more efficient and less expensive for patients to directly pay their doctors rather than both having to deal with the insurance companies.
Second, it causes people to go to the doctor, even if the visit is not necessary. For example, before our current healthcare system was in place, people were more likely to go to the doctor only if they really needed to because the money for that visit was coming directly out of their pockets. Now, people have fewer inhibitions about making doctor visits because they pay the same amount to the insurance company whether they visit the doctor once a year or 20 times a year. People may even visit the doctor more times than necessary in order to “get their money’s worth.” This mentality, however, is what is making the cost of health insurance rise each year.
Third, our system is one under which dishonest doctors benefit. Again, doctors don’t get paid by their patients — they get paid by the insurance companies. Thus, doctors submit paperwork to the insurance companies documenting the care they have provided. This process provides ample opportunities for dishonest doctors to make fraudulent insurance claims. Also, doctors have less inhibitions about carrying out expensive, unnecessary tests because their payment comes from an impersonal insurance company rather than a patient.
Fourth, health insurance limits patients’ options. According to Robert E. Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies and the Heritage Foundation, “the current system of third-party payment, which governs government and employment-based insurance arrangements, undermines personal decision making in health care.”
People cannot choose their ideal doctor. They are limited to the doctors covered by their insurance plans. Mofitt points out that “if, for example, a person believes in the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, he may still be required to finance benefits and medical practices he considers morally wrong through health insurance premiums.”
So far, Clinton has won four out of the six primaries and caucuses, and her prospects for the Democratic candidacy seem bright. She’s running on change, and she pledges to solve the healthcare crisis. The healthcare system does have to be changed, but Hillary’s plan would make things worse.
Clinton has stated that if she is elected, she will require that every American be covered by health insurance, whether they want insurance or not. The government would cover people who could not afford insurance. Last fall she confessed on Fox News that “taxes will go up for people making $250,000.” Her healthcare plan says insure the poor, but she will burden those making higher incomes with her frivolous system.
According to Fox News reporters Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, Clinton’s plan “would turn ‘insurance’ into ‘subsidy.’ The concept of insurance is that one pays a relatively low premium to guard against catastrophic expenses that are outside of our ability to meet financially. But her program would really be nothing more than a cash transfer from the healthy to the sick, not an insurance program at all.”
Clinton also fails to mention how her healthcare machine will function. In creating her proposed healthcare network she will also be creating a larger government — another bureaucracy that tax money will be used to fund. Basically she is proposing socialized medicine. Thus, she’s proposing the diametric opposite of what America needs.
01-31-2008