Your Thoughts Exactly

The other day, I was privileged enough to sit in on a conference given by the National Health Policy Forum. I was only allowed to sit in because my father was one of the three presenters. The topic, or topics, was how different healthcare groups were changing their models of delivering care for the 21^st century. The crucial upgrades in healthcare in this country are driven by the technology revolution; computerization of medical records for example, is requiring massive upgrades and changes in how hospitals and clinicians go about their business. Overall, such upgrades are cost efficient and insure better quality of care by providing an electronic level of quality control to remove doctor error. For example, one of the speakers (not my Dad,) gave an example of how computerized medical banks saved him from prescribing the wrong kind of medication to two of his patients. The other crucial revolution is changing healthcare to be more “user-friendly,” through providing patients with more online resources, and improving the quality of the healthcare consumer experience.

Yet as I watched the audience of legislative aides and policy wonks listen to the various speeches, I was overwhelmed by several recognitions. The first is how annoying some people are. I am talking about the guy with the metro haircut and high-priced glasses who read the paper during my Dad’s presentations, then asked one snotty prepared questions to make it seem like he knew what he was talking about. I guess it’s reassuring to know these people still exist. The second was how broken and fundamentally wrong our healthcare system is. Let me explain.

Our healthcare system is a compromise between private enterprise and a government handout system that makes absolutely no sense and works to screw over people exactly like myself. As a private enterprise, healthcare is flawed because the same providers are responsible for providing care for people with very different needs. You have the majority of the population who requires a yearly checkup, immunizations, and very little care or cost to a company. You have a very small population with chronic diseases, or at the end of life or beginning of life, that represents the majority of cost for insurers and healthcare providers.

Of course, we are REQUIRED through Medicare and Medicaid, to subsidize the healthcare of the two most costly populations, the old and the young. But since we still have predominantly for profit healthcare in this country, and healthcare providers are restricted in the amount of money they can earn off these populations that take up more of their costs, the system is set up so that the burden of cost is shifted to the healthy.

Which is ok I guess if you have a job with benefits. If you are like me, however, someone who can’t get a job with benefits, then you are shit out of luck with regards to health insurance. Of course the healthcare providers don’t want to change the system because that would drive away their main source of revenue. The political hacks at the conference only care how new policies affect Medicare and Medicaid because those are the policies they are directly involved with (and probably because of the voting power of old people.)

What we need is to go down one of two paths. The first is to guarantee some sort of universal healthcare coverage in this country. The second is for some healthcare provider to offer cheap health coverage to only healthy young adults. I am talking dirt cheap, minimal coverage. But that’s what this country needs. Because right now, my tax dollars are going to fund the coverage of other people, while I can’t afford any. And that’s not fair.