How Special Interests Will Wreck Health Care Reform

Before we can examine special interest groups effects on pending health care legislation, let’s lay out our objectives first. Our objectives SHOULD be:


- Reduce costs.
- Give every citizen access to good health care insurance.


Clearly, these two objectives are related. The only way we can afford to give every citizen access to health care is by reducing costs … A LOT. So here’s how we can best achieve the above results:


- Include provisions that would prevent doctors from ordering tests merely to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits, which would reduce costs.
- Remove incentives for doctors to refer patients to themselves for more tests (“self-referral”), which would also reduce costs.
- Pay doctors for good care, not per test. Ditto on the costs.
- Prohibit drug companies from advertising. Right now advertising is driving up demand, and thus the cost, of some prescription drugs.
- Transform our healthcare system into a single-payer system. This would ensure that all citizens are covered equally and help businesses complete in a global economy. Single-payer systems in other countries prevent companies from being saddled with health care costs for their employees.



Did I miss anything? Feel free to comment and add to the discussion. Anyway, here’s why these things will not happen:


Democrats and Republicans will not draft and/or vote on health care legislation based on whether or not they think it will achieve the stated objectives. Our elected officials will, as always, be more concerned with keeping the special interest groups who are big campaign donors happy.


Doctors order unnecessary tests based on either protecting themselves from malpractice lawsuits (and who can blame them, really?) and/or whether or not they own the equipment that will be used for the test. And since they’re paid by the test and not based on whether the patient gets good care, they have yet another reason to order test after test. Here’s a great in-depth article from the Washington Post about doctors “self-referring” patients.


Pharmaceutical companies love being able to advertise, which drives up demand and thus prices for their products. They claim that any health care reform that decreases drug prices would make them unable to justify R&D costs. Yeah, right.


Labor unions are another group with a stake in this. The tax exclusion for health benefit costs. While it seems to be sensible to tax this (especially if there’s an exemption for the first, say, $15,000, which would exempt all but the richest of benefit plans) they’re against it because they’ve negotiated such sweet benefits deals with employers that their members WOULD be taxed, even with an exemption for the first $15,000 in health care benefits.


And of course, insurance companies won’t want any publicly supported health insurance companies to be created because that would create competition for them. They’ll go out of business, they say. Boo-hoo. These arguments matter little to me, since continuing the status quo, which the insurance companies love, is costing Americans and American businesses a fortune ... and more and more every year.


What can we do? Call or e-mail your Senators and Representatives so that your voice is heard. And don’t believe ANYTHING you read or hear without checking a neutral source. You can rest assured that pretty much anything that comes out of a politician’s mouth is carefully crafted to suit their needs and has little or nothing to with the truth. So feel free to call them on it when you hear them spouting crap, too. Put your zip code into the box on the top left of this website to find out how to contact your congressional reps.