Health Care Issues

We’ve been dealing lots of them recently at YPS Manor. I’m tired of the neat trick large offices use for dealing with patients. If you have a sufficiently large practice, as the doctors at Baylor Clinic do, you have a multiplicity of waiting areas. You shuffle your patients from waiting area to waiting area so the illusion of progress is being made. In reality, you’re still sitting around a doctor’s office looking at 30 year old magazines for 4 hours waiting for someone to tell you WTF is happening.

Anyhow, the lovely and talented Jane Galt has a proposal on how to handle health care insurance in America. Her proposal makes me clutch my head and scream, because a casual glimpse shows more opportunity for unintended consequences than I’m prepared to accept. Additionally, Jane is working on getting herself kicked out of the club by the more doctrinaire libertarians out there. If you advocate the government doing much of anything, you are highly suspect.

Will has a list of suggestions as a response to some of her earlier thoughts on the matter. I freely admit his suggestions are more to my liking. However, they make me scream and clutch my head for the same reason most libertarian policy proposals do. They are completely and totally impractical. I don’t mean his ideas would not work as public policy. I mean they have a chance of happening roughly equivalent to the chance of me flapping my arms vigorously and achieving low-earth orbit as a result.

Both analyses of the problem, I think, miss one simple aspect of health care that has to be addressed first. A large percentage of Americans deeply and firmly believe that someone else should pay for their health care. Whether that someone is their employer, the government, or the health care fairy is something they aren’t going to worry about so long as they ain’t paying for it. Convince people they have no right to health care and they have to pay for the health care they receive and real reform is possible. As long as most people think health care should be cheap and the real costs borne by others, reform is a dead issue. The problem gets worse, not better. We’ll continue shuffling the money around through absurd transfer mechanism to disguise who is really paying for the health care we receive.