Some Thoughts On Health Care Reform

A friend of mine on Facebook asked me for my views on health care reform. So, as briefly as I can make them, here they are.

For the past fourteen years, I’ve been running a medium sized recording studio and working as a freelance record producer. In other words, I’m self employed. For twelve of those years, I was without health insurance. Why? Because a health insurance plan for a single self employed patient costs roughly the same as a 30 year mortgage on a $165,000 house. So, for twelve years, I paid all of my medical costs out of pocket: doctor visits, prescriptions, and even a couple of emergency room visits, one of which included a $500 ziplock baggie with ice in it.

In 2007, because California allows for domestic partner insurance, I was able to get insurance through Jessica’s employer. Six weeks after the insurance took effect, I had to visit the emergency room. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it was a minor issue, and I was there for six hours, and the only treatment I received was a small shot of morphine and an endoscopy. The bill for this was over $50,000.

Had this happened to me just six weeks earlier, quite simply, I would have been ruined financially.

We need health care reform desperately, both for the uninsured, and for the insured. The current system is completely unsustainable. It’s choking small businesses to death and forcing the self-employed to either go uninsured or live in poverty.

Also, if you’re a pinko commie social liberal like me, you might also believe that a for-profit health care system that allows for a cost/benefit analysis on whether someone lives or dies is fundamentally immoral, that retroactive cancellations are fundamentally immoral, and that denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions is fundamentally immoral. If you’re a conservative, you might at least consider that sweeping health reform with a strong public option will, at the very least, be better for business.

In short, that’s my view. But I’ll add this, a few facts about our current system:

• Reform opponents in congress like to tell Americans that the United States has the best healthcare system in the world. The World Health Organization rates the United States 37th out of 191 countries it ranked on health care in 2000. The report analyses five factors: 1.) life expectancy, 2.) inequalities in health, 3.) the responsiveness of the system in providing diagnosis and treatment, 4.) inequalities in responsiveness, and 5.) how fairly systems are financed.

• If your car was manufactured in the United States, nearly $2000 of what you paid for it went towards providing health insurance for the workers who assembled it.

• In 1995, the number of uninsured workers in the United States was 14%. Today, it is 20% and rising.

• Health insurance premiums are currently rising 6 to 8 times faster than wages.

• Since 1999, employment-based health insurance premiums have increased 120 percent, compared to cumulative inflation of 44 percent and cumulative wage growth of 29 percent during the same period.

• In 2008, health care spending in the United States reached $2.4 trillion, 17 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). Health care spending is projected to reach $3.1 trillion in 2012 and $4.3 trillion by 2016.

• Reform opponents often say that they don’t want a “government bureaucrat standing between them and their doctor,” but a 2003 study by the New England Journal of Medicine showed that patients with private insurance received the care recommended by their doctors only 54.9 percent of the time.

• The currently proposed reform bill will not: force anyone to give up their current health plan, insure illegal immigrants, pay for abortions, pay for sex change operations, or force elderly patients to discuss end-of-life planning with anyone.