Come get your healthcare.
Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who didn’t have trouble with the law last week, worries about power unchecked by competition:
Most private organizations have some competitors, and this fact makes me more comfortable interacting with them. If Harvard is a bad employer, I can move to Princeton or Yale, and this knowledge keeps Harvard in line. To be sure, we need a government-run court system to enforce contracts, prevent fraud, and preserve honest competition. But it is fundamentally competition among private organizations that I trust.
My HMO, Inter-Mountain Healthcare, has competitors. I can use Blue Cross, or the University of Utah system, or a host of other insurance vendors. Our insurance guy regularly floats new options past us. We can even compete with IHC ourselves by partially self-insuring – something we will likely do later this year.
This ensures that when I needed an endocrinologist, I called their Patient Advocate line and I got one a few days later. Not months. Not even weeks. A few days later, and the endocrinologist (who is eager to please IHC) called me personally. Because I have options they fight for my business.
Compare that to… the DMV. Or trying to get your kid away from a bad teacher at your public school, or begging for a zoning variance for a garage you want to add. Or pretty much any other interaction you might have with government at any levels.
I like my HMO and if I didn’t I would switch. ObamaCare may promise that, but it is a transparent lie. We will be stuck and it will suck.
This ENTIRE healthcare reform is not about helping people that don’t’ have insurance. It is about switching union healthcare obligations to the taxpayers.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I do not agree with you. We have a 26-year-old daughter who cannot obtain health care anywhere at any price due to a chronic illness. She is unable to work due to her health. We would be glad to help her pay premiums for health insurance, and we would expect to pay more than the average person because she is a heavy consumer of health care services, but no insurance company will touch her.
If she could not obtain car insurance because she had been convicted of drunk driving two or three times, our state has a high-risk insurance pool that would offer her coverage at higher than market rates. But because she is sick through no fault of her own, there is nothing available to her.
Unless health care reform passes, her only option is going to be to spend her life savings, carefully and painfully put away from summer jobs in the hope that she could one day attend graduate school, and go on Medicaid. But in our state, that requires being found disabled and eligible for SSI, so she will also be going on the public dole as well. She truly is disabled, but she is the kind of person who would make heroic efforts to work if it would not mean losing the only type of health care available to her.
I do not see how it benefits the country to gain another welfare recipient only because there is no other way she can get health care coverage.
August 9th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
The last estimate I heard was that about 5 million people are uninsurable due to chronic pre-existing conditions. Just so you know, I’m one of them. Were my coverage ever to lapse, I’d be unable to get new coverage.
I’m quite open to working out a system where we – and they – share the cost of their medical costs. I think the problem quite solvable and worthy of national effort.
But wrecking the system that helps 250 million quite nicely to help 5 million hardly seems right.