Health Reform News

Oh yes. There is something else on Congress's agenda besides a Supreme Court nominee. Health reform. Remember that?

So why do we need to do this reform? Well, I think my friend Joanne Kennan, has a great post on today's New America Foundation Blog, which links to someone else. She notes that not only is Congress divided, so are physicians themselves (and the AMA really does not speak for them much any more). The link is to Bob Doherty's Blog post.

And train wreck we are already seeing. Once again people are losing jobs, and losing their main source of insurance. New America also talks about the rise in emergency room care. This is a fundamentally dangerous situation. Why? Well, take a look. It reflects part of the problem with employer care. First off, it is a problem because when you need insurance, because you cannot pay for things, because you lost your job, it's not there. Second, it is absurd to think about health care as an employee benefit, as Ezra Klein points out.

Emergency room care too as the New America posting shows it is expensive. It creates weird subsidization in hospitals raising the costs for everyone else. It provides care that does not actually help improve overall health.

And what happens if you have emergency only care and cannot pay for things? Well, Matt Ygelsias, in his much more inflamatory style lays it out nicely:

Now in the current American status quo you might be able to sign up for Medicaid (socialism!) or else go to the ER and get some unpaid-for health care once your condition deteriorates enough. But it is worth being clear that the free market solution to someone being poor and sick is for them to die. If you’re too poor for HBO, you go without watchingTrue Blood. If you’re too poor for a MacBook Pro, you make due without one. And if you’re too poor for statins you get a heart attack. And if you’re too poor to get your heart attack treated you die. Whether or not anyone in the United States actually wants to implement such a system isn’t clear to me, but that would be what a free market health care system looked like—like free markets in other things.

So, we have a broken system.

But, there is hope. Some initiatives are showing us a way forward. In my last cite to them tonight, New America points out the Keystone Project, which involved creating a checklist, is showing more and more great results. And it is saving money too.

We need reform to cover people. We need it to funnel them into care. And we need it to really help promote things like the Keystone Project. Coverage is tough, but it has to happen, and it probably should go first, because it is the only way for us all to have a stake in the game.