caveat emptor

I read this great article entitled Consumption from the New Yorker’s April 17 issue refruiting an editorial in the April 3 issue of the New York Times by Bush’s lead healthcare policy person, Allan B. Hubbard. Hubbard’s Times article champions health savings accounts, a program whose benefits are only realizable by life long wage earners or more accurately they don’t address the three out of ten people who will become completely disabled before they reach retirement age. He also states, “IN the past five years, private health insurance premiums have risen 73 percent. Some businesses have responded by dropping
healthcare coverage, leaving employees uninsured. Other employers pass the costs on to workers, both by raising co-payments and premiums and by denying
workers the wage increases they need to afford...”


According to the New Yorker’s article Hubbard’s message is, “Health care is expensive because the vast majority of Americans consume it as if it were free. Health insurance policies with low deductibles insulate people
from the cost of the medical care they use—so much so that they often do not even ask for prices.”

**Come again?? Ever tried to help someone figure out the new prescription drug plan through Medicare? How many people do you know without health coverage right now? If illness or injury strike these folks what will their options be for shopping around- probably hunt and peck care that they are able to afford until they spend down enough of their assets to qualify for publicly funded, substandard care. Do we call that a good system? Clearly this administration has no intention of creating an equitable system of care. Hubbard seems to be saying that health care is just another market place where buyer beware.

Quoting from the New Yorker’s article again, “Health care is indeed expensive, but not because people are too quick to call the doctor when they experience a scary symptom or merely an annoying one,
and not because some of them may bridle at entrusting their health to the lowest bidder. Throughout the Western world, health care is expensive, first
of all, because it is expensive, and is bound to get more so as populations age and medical technology advances. Indeed, it should get more expensive,
both in absolute terms and as a proportion of national income, because what it aims to provide—healing, the relief of suffering, the staving off of death—is
of such inestimable value.”
“American health care is the most expensive on earth, but this, too, has little to do with overindulgence in seeking medical attention. (Overindulgence in
cheeseburgers is another matter.) It has a lot to do with the waste built into what Paul Krugman calls our crazy-quilt health-care system, which has a
lot to do with the fact that so much of that system is private rather than public, which in turn has a lot to do with two other factors. One is historical:
during the Second World War, industry (with prodding from organized labor) got around wage controls by offering workers health benefits in place of cash,
thus saddling the United States with “employer-based” private health insurance—a system now in slow-motion collapse under the competitive pressures of
globalization. The other is institutional: even though there has long been popular support here for universal, government-run health care, as there is
in Europe and Canada, America’s fragmented political system—riddled with weak points where well-organized, well-financed minorities can thwart the unfocussed
will of a majority—has been able to deliver only for seniors and, less generously, for the poor.”