The hard truth about health care

Ezra Klein has done it again. He has implicitly led to a conclusion we all know is the eventual must of our healthcare system with his factual explanation of our healthcare dilemma by the numbers, by the policy, and by inference from countries that are more successful in their implementation of Universal Healthcare.

In Klein’s non-confrontational style, likely because he is writing for the Washington Post that however progressive is still dependent and a part of our corrupt corporate structure, does not address the reason why we are having such a problem getting it right. We will all be better served if real Liberals and Progressives call a spade a spade.

The only solution to our healthcare dilemma is to remove the health insurance companies from the mix as they provide no innovation. Their sole purpose is to skim upwards of 30% of premiums paid and enrich shareholders of the insurance companies and executives at the expense of investing those monies in healthcare proper. Additionally using technology to remove duplicate testing and paying for results as opposed to paying for procedures is a necessity. Sales people, engineers, etc. are paid for results. Our healthcare system should as well.

The titans of our healthcare system want a status quo that maintains duplicate testing, procedure based payments, insurance companies, etc. because each of these is another cost center to derive more profits from said inefficiencies.

We need articulate knowledgeable reporters like Ezra Klein and many others to be as effective as the Republican Right Wing echo chamber is in misinforming to drive the truth home to American citizens.A Single Payer Healthcare System, where one entity pays all healthcare bills and every American is responsible for paying into said system is the only system that will provably work. Absent this the bankruptcy of our country looms.

The hard truth about health care

By Ezra Klein, Published: June 6

Everyone in Washington claims to want the same thing lately: a “serious conversation” about health-care costs. So let’s have one.

Republicans have a plan that has been tried repeatedly but that has never worked. Democrats have a plan that might work in theory, but it is untested at the scale they’ll need for it to work in practice. And both parties are too scared to talk about the only plan that has worked.

But before we get to that plan, I want to tell you about a graph.

I found it buried inside a Kaiser Family Foundation brief entitled “Health Care Spending in the United States and Selected OECD Countries.” Inauspicious, maybe. But it should change the way we think about health-care costs. Because what it shows is that we’ve failed. Failed to control costs. Failed to restrain the growth of government.

And it shows something else, too: Where we’ve failed, others have succeeded.

Everyone knows — or should know — that the United States spends much more than any other country on health care. But the Kaiser Family Foundation broke that spending down into two parts: the government’s share and the private sector’s share (both measured as a percentage of total gross domestic product), then compared the results to figures from 12 other countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And here’s the shocker: Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland.

Think about that for a minute. Canada has a single-payer health-care system. The government is the only insurer of any note. The United Kingdom has a socialized system, in which the government is not only the sole insurer of note but also employs most of the doctors and nurses and runs most of the hospitals. And yet, measured as a share of the economy, our government health-care system is the largest of the bunch.

And it’s worse than that: Atop our giant government health-care sector, we have an even more giant private health-care sector. Altogether, we’re spending about 16 percent of the GDP on health care. No other country even tops 12 percent. Which means we’ve got the worst of both worlds: huge government and high costs.

This is where a “serious conversation” on health-care costs would start — with what has worked, and what we can learn from it. Instead, it’s where our conversation about health-care costs never quite goes.

The Republican plan, in fact, heads in the opposite direction: The GOP outsources Medicare to private insurers and gives senior citizens checks that cover less and less of the cost of insurance every year. Republicans hope that when faced with more cost pressure and more options, seniors will be able to exert the sort of consumer pressure that lowers prices while retaining, or even improving, quality.

What they’ve got in mind already exists in Medicare. “Our premium-support plan is modeled after the Medicare Part D prescription-drug program,” Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told me. But Part D hasn’t controlled costs. Instead, premiums have risen by 57 percent since 2006, and the program is expected to see nearly 10 percent growth in annual costs over the next decade.

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