The most popular topic in the political world lately has been health care. I have tried to refrain from writing about it because of its charged nature.  However, I haven’t been completely quiet about the issue. I have my opinions and Facebook has seen quite a bit of it!

First off, I am competely against the bill and the idea of universal health care. There is no such thing as a good bill that is thousand pages long and there is no such thing as a well run government system. Those are both fairytales.

It is entirely ineffective that those on the side of the bill resort to name calling in the form of the Bush Administration’s tactic of calling critics unpatriotic and the Obama Administration’s tactic of calling critics racists. Both are unproductive and not what a debate is about.

As expected, those who want the bill passed don’t want a debate; they just pay lip service to the idea. The real debate is not whether we should have reform or not. No one disagrees that the current system is imperfect and needs to be reformed. However, reform is a vague term.

There is no guarantee that any old reform will make things better. Things aren’t so bad that there is no way the government can make it worse. We aren’t at rock bottom.

The real debate should be what kind of reform we should have. The only way we can have an intelligent debate on is if we understand what the problems are and not how to solve the symtoms.

The problem is not that we have an estimated 45 million uninsured people in the United States. Having health insurance and having health care is not the same thing. For whatever reasons, we have become conditioned to believing that the two terms are interchangeable. It is how the media talks about it and it is how the politicians talk about it.

The underlying problem with health insurance is that we are insuring every medical procedure under the sun. It doesn’t matter if its a check up, a cold, cancer, or broken bones. The system insures it all. This is not the case in any other insurance industry. No one buys car insurance to cover oil changes and tune-ups. We don’t buy house insurance for carpet stains.

Insurance is to insure us from large, catastrophic events. If you break a bone, you could use insurance. If you want to insure against getting cancer, you should get insurance. If you have a cold, you should not be using insurance.

The only thing that happens when we insure everything is we increase costs with paperwork and allow doctors to charge the absolute maximum price because the consumer doesn’t pay for it out of pocket. When was the last time you went to the doctor and cared how much your visit cost? You only cared about the deductible because it comes directly out of your pocket at the time of the visit.

When you don’t know the price and don’t care what the price is, there is no reason for you to shop around for the best value. The system itself perpetuates higher prices indefinitely with no end in sight. Even while technological improvements should be reducing the price of medicine, costs are still increasing.

This doesn’t make any sense.

In every other field, technology brings prices down. How can it be that technology increases prices in medicine? How can streamlining the process cause prices to increase? If it weren’t for technological advances, prices would be even higher!

Now, why is it that health insurance companies don’t operate more like auto and home insurance companies? It is certainly not because the consumer is demanding that health care operate this way. Once upon a time, people did go visit doctors and knew what they were paying per visit.

Insurance didn’t always cover everything under the sun. The culprit is the government. They have created an environment where it is better for the insurance companies to cover everything. They have made it so that it is more expensive for individuals to buy insuranace and given companies tax breaks for providing employees with insurance. So, if you lose or switch your job, you lose your insurance. What sense does that make?

If there was no cost benefit for getting our health insurance from our jobs, we wouldn’t do it that way! It isn’t more convenient and doesn’t provide us with more freedom.

They have disallowed us from buying insurance across State lines. If an insurance company two States over offers a better plan for you and they are willing to serve you, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so? I’m not saying it will be cheaper or better but, why don’t we have the option? The only ones who knows what’s best for us, is us.

It is economic law that competition drives down prices and creates greater value for consumers. Politically creating monopolies for local insurance companies do not benefit us.

While a group of people have decided to boycott Whole Foods‘ for John Mackey’s OpEd in the WSJ, he brings up very good points as to what the real health care debate should be. Not all of his recommendations may be right. His system at Whole Foods might not work everywhere–which should tell you that any national system would also fail–but, at least he is presenting real debate points.

Instead of just towing party lines.

There is no doubt we need health care reform. I don’t believe we need Obama’s reform. I would go as far as to say that it will make things worse. Until we are willing to have a real debate on the issue, we will never have reform that doesn’t need to be forced down the throats of Americans.

By Tommy Leung

Tags: Facebook, health care, Health care in the United States, health care reform, health insruance reform, Health insurance, Insurance, John Mackey, Medicine, obamacare, single payer health care, universal healthcare

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