Eliminating the middle man does not mean "socialized medicine"!

April 14, 2008 -- Health insurance is not to be confused with health care. It is a distinct industry. And it is a parasitic one. It is expensive yet it creates no value. We need to shut it down.

Defenders of the status quo use scare tactics (see Krugman, above) to defend their hegemony. But common sense dictates otherwise.

"[This] bureaucracy consumes 31 percent of health spending, versus 17 percent in Canada. The difference translates into $350 billion frittered away annually here, where a million healthcare workers, as well as hundreds of thousands in the insurance industry, spend their days on useless paperwork.

"This waste is a natural byproduct of private insurance. Private plan overhead is eleven times that of Canada's NHI program. Each dollar spent on private premiums buys only 78 cents of care; the rest pays for insurer's marketing, underwriting, utilization review and profits -- and for the billions paid to their CEOs. Fragmented coverage also means duplication of claims-processing facilities and mountains of paperwork for doctors and hospitals, which must deal with multiple insurance products each with its own eligibility rules, co-payments, referral networks, etc. -- tasks that are absent in Canada. Our multiplicity of insurers also precludes the payment to hospitals of a global, lump-sum budget. In Canada, global budgets obviate the need for most hospital billing and much of the internal accounting needed to attribute costs to individual patients and payers."

The Nation, 4/14/2008.

Cartoon by my Dad, Charles Keller.
(Yes, that's Jimmy Carter...
Our health care dysfunction is not a new problem.)

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