Health Care and American Politics

An Independent View

Health care has become one of the most divisive issues in America today.  Why?  Very simply put it is divisive because it has become the latest political football game and in Washington D C these days every day is “Super Bowl” day.  While all of us enjoy a good game once in a while it shouldn’t be at our expense either as individuals who need health care or as taxpayers who are being asked to foot the bill.  So how would I as an independent look at this issue.

First, do we have a problem in America with health care?  ABSOLUTELY, WE DO!  It is too expensive.  It is affecting the ability of American businesses to be competitive in the world marketplace.  There are far too many Americans without health care, the uninsured.  The taxpayer is already beginning to feel the pinch by having to support hospitals that must provide certain emergency room services where the uninsured inevitably end up.  Health care costs are accelerating much faster than the rate of inflation.  Health care costs are now consuming almost one sixth of our gross national product.  Health care insurance is becoming excessively expensive and is not providing the “free market” benefits that one should expect.  Health care insurance is also increasing in cost at rates that are simply unsustainable.  Is there a problem that must be solved?  ABSOLUTELY.

Is the current law a good solution to these very dramatic problems?  NO.  For starters, it is clearly the product of lifelong bureaucrats who think that the solution to our problems is a 2,000 page tome of complicated legal stipulations that is long on bureaucracy and short on solutions.  Its first most obvious failing is that it is spread out over the next decade before its various parts are fully implemented.  The first thing that this means is that instead of being a solution to an immediate problem, it adds to the difficulty of assessing whether or not it is working.  It will be a minimum of 10 years before we know whether the "fix" is actually helping or if it has become part of the problem.  As the saying goes, "is this any way to run an airline?"   Such a solution in a business context is unimaginable.  We will be bankrupt before we know whether it is good or bad.  This is no way to cure the problem.  We wouldn’t think the Doctor’s advice was too good if we went to him / her with a problem and they said “Wait two years, take an aspirin, wait two more years, visit a therapist, and wait two more years and then if you aren’t better come back to see me.”  Such a prescription in the real world is laughable, but that is what our brilliant politicians in Washington are proposing, at least those who favored the law.  The other side, represented by the incumbent in this race, is supporting doing nothing.  It is way past time for the Republicans to be taking the “high road” on this.  For six years they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House and they did nothing.  They say they are for tort reform.  Did they make any effort to pass it when they controlled both the legislative and the executive branches of government?  Their protestations of wanting the best for the American people ring hollow in light of the reality that the American people gave them a golden opportunity and they wasted it!

What should have been done and eventually will have to be done, is to tackle this very complex problem through a carefully thought out plan that takes on the most critical and most easily solved elements first.  The one thing we Americans want most is to maintain some control over our own health.  We do not want to hand over this most personal dimension of our lives to a bureaucrat either in the government or in some mega corporation that only cares about corporate profits and shareholder dividends.  The first most critical issue that both tackles the cost problem and preserves our freedom of choice when it comes to our medical care is to take on the medical insurance industry.  We have done this with worker’s comp insurance, we have done this with crop insurance, we could have done it with health insurance and we still should.  It is very probably that one-day we will have to.  Why not today?  As a small businessman I found that I was being gouged by the medical insurance premiums.  I found a way to self insure my own employees for all medical expenses up to $5,000 and then I purchased a major medical policy that covered them should they encounter major medical problems.  This approach saved the company thousands of dollars in the first year.  Simpler solutions, like that are available if we had legislators who applied real business solutions and not bureaucratic ones.

I look forward to your responses and to having the opportunity to dialogue with as many of you as I possibly can in the coming weeks leading up to the primary.

Respectfully, Leland Yialelis, your INDEPENDENT candidate for Congress.

For further reflection:

 “On March 1, 2010, billionaire Warren Buffett (who is considered one of the world’s most savvy investors^[53]) said that the high costs paid by U.S. companies for their employees’ health care put them at a competitive disadvantage. He compared the roughly 17% of GDP spent by the U.S. on health care with the 9% of GDP spent by much of the rest of the world, noted that the U.S. has fewer doctors and nurses per person, and said, “[t]hat kind of a cost, compared with the rest of the world, is like a tapeworm eating at our economic body.”^{[54]  from} Wickipedia”

In seven years, the total cost of uncompensated care—uncollected medical debts and charity care by hospitals and other health providers—has increased by over 80 percent from $457 million in 2002 to a projected $830 million by the end of this year.

Many of these costs are quietly passed on to the insured in the form of a hidden tax. According to the report, uncompensated care costs the average insured Washington family $917 a year.  Washington State Report Details Cost of Medically Uninsured