No- It's Not Reform

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have made it clear that I think the current health care debate and the bills it has spawned are a bad joke in poor taste.  (see here and here).  While the insurance industry may be a problem it is not the only problem or even the largest contributor to the outrageous health care expenses in the United States.  Not to surprisingly the CEO of Kaiser Permanente agrees but he has some really convincing evidence that he shared with Ezra Klein. 

There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

Go check out the charts. It becomes obvious that nothing in any of the current health care reform bills will do anything to reform the real problem and in fact may make things worse.  The insurance companies are not the real problem. 

As I said before no bill is better than a bad bill and bad bills is all we have seen.

Comments

[geoff]

When I've looked at the details of the proposed legislation - House & Senate - I'd wonder why anyone was even moderately optimistic about the problem. The public option will somehow induce competition to control cost escalation, even if it is extremely robust I don't think so. The Bill Obama signs I suspect will be the classic silk purse out of a sows ear mess but the spinning on the historic moment and the significance should be entertaining momentarily.