Healthcare and simple lessons

The discussion regarding health care proposals, and getting everybody in the US covered by some health insurance company, in the multiple threads and places it’s being thumped back and forth on the internet, has come to the place that I don’t think I see anybody actually addressing what the person they are arguing with is saying, nor is the person they are arguing with addressing what they are saying.

Ergo, I’m gonna lay this out as best I can, given the limitations of the written word. We’ll see if anyone can get onboard with this.

I’m 54. I remember a time when NOBODY stayed away from the doctor if they had something home remedies (aspirin, orange juice, rest, etc) couldn’t fix. NOBODY did. Doctors worked it out, patients worked it out, they came together and made it happen, because the doctor was committed to healing people and the patient was committed to paying his own way as much as possible. It’s how normal people used to think.

By the way, that situation is properly called “universal health care.” Nobody went without what was needed. If nobody goes without, that’s universal (as regards the US, which is what this discussion is about).

Not that way now. Why?

The 122 people dying per day on average is probably a decent enough estimation to work with. It ought to make every American sick. Personally, I think it does, whatever side of the aisle they are on. It surely says to anyone “It’s not the way it was, today.” Again, why?

For one thing, health care is not a calling anymore, it’s a business. It transmogrified from decent human beings helping human beings (and having to deal with a business side of getting that done) to the crap we have today, where a decent doctor that puts patient above bottom line shines like a searchlight in a cave. I know. I’m trying to change general practitioners because I just moved. I have 3 people in the family who practice health care, and ALL their suggestions for good Docs are met with “full up and am unable to take new patients, just have no room, very sorry” or some version of it.

The second factor is insurance companies. No, not the way they are run, that’s transitive, short termed, can chance with the winds of fortune. The factor here is the fundamental idea that it’s a good thing for somebody else to pay my way. As soon as insurance companies became the person who paid the doctor, instead of the patient, insurance companies got the power to say what they would and would not pay for.

So now, instead of two players in the game, the patient and the doc, there are three: the patient, the doc, and the payer. The trouble is, the payer is not there for humanitarian reasons, the payer is there for business reasons. If he gets enough money from premiums, he’s betting he can invest that money and make more than he has to pay back out. Nothing wrong with a business, but if anyone forgets that player #3 in the game is not there to make the patient well, but is there to make money, then that could be a fatal mistake, literally.

So, here we are. The mistake that has been made is inserting something not medical (business) into medicine, and the outcome is absence of treatment for people who need it (as well as some other bad stuff that should be the substance of another discussion, not this one).

If I flip a switch, and everything goes bad, I flip the switch back. If I open a valve and things go bad, I shut the valve back. If you do something, and it goes bad, the very best first response is to go back to where things were stable, and THEN figure out IF something else needs to be done.

However, that’s not what’s being proposed. We let medicine stop being medicine and let it become a business, and now, the proposal is to make medicine government. So, I’m supposed to believe that government is a better third player in the game than insurance is? Why? Some proposals leave insurance in the game and insert government, too. To me, that’s even worse. Instead of going back to when it worked, now that it’s been complicated so that it doesn’t work, our “leaders” are trying to go to something else even more complicated. Now, we have to hope that the govvie cares for us just as much as the doc does. We did that before. We said before “no, they wouldn’t make soley business decisions, nobody could be that cold” of the insurance companies. We were wrong.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. There is one and ONLY one solution to people not being able to go to a doctor, and that is going back to the ONLY way we’ve ever seen it work. NOBODY is trying to do that. One group wants to keep their insurance buddies happy, one wants to make political hay while the sun shines, and others want to bridge the two at one place or another. It is stupidity following stupidity. We did this right, once, but we can’t go do it like that again, God forbid. NO, the govvie forbid, because enabling this will simply make the govvie be one step closer to being the god for more Americans yet.

Liberty for the brave, with sadness,

Al