Suture Yourself… and Save

A recent government study (released March 7^th) – the Centers for Disease Control's National Health Interview Survey – polled 52,000 Americans on the issue of healthcare affordability, and what they discovered was a profoundly dangerous trend. While in 2010, only one in five Americans was struggling to pay pent up medical bills, that number hit a staggering one in three just one year later. Interesting since the largest impact of the Obama’s healthcare legislation, so viciously attacked by the pro-business GOP, was to create billions of new mandatory new customers for the most expensive (aggregate and on average… by far!!!) private healthcare insurance system on earth without any competitive pressures from a bargain basement government alternative (go big bad insurance companies!) while making sure our pharmaceutical companies face zero competition from reasonably priced alternatives from Canada or Europe. And while clearly America does have the best doctors, hospitals and facilities on earth, unfortunately for most of us, we get what we can afford, and that often results in unparalleled access to a most mediocre standard of medical care.

In short, with the new legislation, we got a big mandate with very little in the way of genuine cost control. Oh sure, the statute paid lip service to restraining massive administrative costs (which hit 31% of the entire American medical cost budget), but since medical costs and health insurance amped up another 9% last year, it would seem that neither Republicans nor Democrats really got what they wanted. But you can bet that this administration isn’t going to do anything, and face the do-nothing road-block House of Representatives, unless they win in November… and one way or another depending on who is president and the composition of the new Congress… we’ll either see a massive repeal effort or half-assed tweaking with very little in the way of logic… unless you are a member of the vast pool of highly successful lobbyists from the medical insurance/pharma world.

PBS (March 8^th) summarizes the results of that CDC report: “In 2011, one in three Americans were part of a family that would call their medical bills a ‘financial burden.’ One in five struggled to pay those bills each month and one in 10 admitted they wouldn't be able to pay them at all. Perhaps just as startling: even for those who have private insurance, 26.7 percent needed to stagger their medical payments because they couldn't afford to pay off those bills entirely at the end of the month… After speaking with 52,000 people between January and June of 2011, the researchers also concluded that the chances of having trouble paying medical bills decreased with age. According to Robin Cohen, a statistician and principal author of the report, children 17 years old and younger were more than three times as likely as adults aged 75 and over to be in families having problems paying medical bills in the past year.”

And Congress is continuing to hack away at Medicare coverage… ostensibly because we simply can’t afford the safety net anymore by reason of our ballooning deficit… but they’d rather let old folks suffer than truly address the cuts in defense spending – why do we really need to spend more than the next ten nations combined spend on their military budget – from a bloated budget dictated by a powerful coterie of defense contractors who make it plain that post-military-career-lucrative jobs await flag officers who play ball during their final years of active service.

With labor trends moving away from traditional employment toward contract workers and outsourcing, American workers are increasingly left to fend for themselves when it comes to health insurance. They are self-employed and have to write those monthly checks (or go without)… there’s no union or company plan that makes such costs fade away. It’s a question of priorities, of course, but picture yourself waking up in a hospital – after an unexpected traumatic event – immobile with tubes in your nose, bandages everywhere, an IV bag over your head and a nasty monitor telling you all is not well with your world. Then picture that in addition to this horrible situation, when you get out of the hospital, if you don’t have enough coverage or any coverage at all, your next trauma awaits: bankruptcy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am wondering when this Christian concern for your fellow man is scheduled to begin, because I’d like to mark it in my calendar.