Health Care Dominated by Financial Interests - No Leadership in Politics

Recently, my children and I spoke about our President’s evident failure to lead. One of the first rules of leadership is that leaders need to describe the “what.” If a leader cannot adequately describe the benefits of going to the promised land, no one will follow. Great leaders also allow others to decide “how” or at least to input in, “the how” so that there can be wide agreement that the way we are going to get to the promise land is sustainable. Instead we see our politics as usual…the politics of compromise.

How can compromise work when health care is so dominated by financial interests? Health insurers and drug companies are spending a reported $1.6 million dollars a day. They have hired over 1,000 new lobbyists, most who have been former congressmen or former staff members of congressmen and senators, to work their old colleagues into compromising what should be a moral imperative into an expensive trick. We have a habit of doing this in our country when it’s evident that things need to be done, the forces that make the most money from the status quo push compromise.

We had a real chance to end slavery when our constitution was drafted but we let the economic forces in the south sustain slavery, so our country continued with it for over 100 years. After the Civil War, we could have really installed civil rights laws; making it possible for everyone to vote, but we didn’t. It took another 100 years of civil rights laws to give every citizen in this country the same rights, and still we live with its aftermath. This is not a way to build a society. There are some things that we cannot compromise. In today’s world, we simply cannot be the only developed country in the world that doesn’t provide basic health care to all its citizens. The truth is, it is affordable; it just isn’t affordable in the way that people are presenting it, and that’s on purpose.

When we combine profit and overhead from the top seven biggest health insurance companies in America, it’s $400 billion dollars a year…or $4 trillion that is spent every decade. Only eighty cents of our premium dollars spent with private insurance companies are actually spent on health care. Medicare spends 97% of our tax dollars, but Medicare in its current form isn’t the answer either. It is far to subject to the failings of political bureaucracies. Medicare is loaded with waste and inefficiency.

There are solutions! A national citizen co-op could also work on a very high level of efficiency limiting what is spent to somewhere south of three percent. Also, if every individual agreed to spend up to three percent of their income on health care out of their own pocket we would be much more careful on our purchases of health care, using the Internet to find out what is best, and by following doctor and hospital ratings. This is truly within our grasp, but we are letting it all go because of old style thinking. If people want private health care, they can get it; just like some people send their children to expensive private schools, people could hire private doctors and have private hospitals. There are excellent universities ran by the public. The University of California Berkeley, and UCLA are examples of schools that provide educations that are certainly equal to the Ivy League schools. So the idea that private and public solution can’t exist at the same time is just simply not true.

But, rarely do we hear of this from our President or his leaders. Instead we hear what is absolutely necessary, and what is willing to be given up, and what is likely to be a Frankenstein version of a public and private health care that is full of corruption, just like our defense procurement processes are. Hopefully, my assessment of our new President’s leadership capabilities or intent is premature.  If not, we’re going to be in for a long slog of the same.

FOR MORE ON HEALTH CARE, SEE MY OTHER POSTS:

Outraged at the Politics of Healthcare

Will Marre’s Radical Solution to Health Care