The initiatives for healthcare near the top of President Bush’s agenda stop far short of pointing the finger at the most fundamental root of healthcare delivery dysfunction—the lack of affordable insurance for all Americans. Because all delivery is driven by coverage, blaming attorneys under a banner of “tort reform” for the short-comings of medical device manufacturers or for impaired providers, and failing to heed very preventable “adverse events” is not a viable solution to the serious problems our healthcare delivery system faces.
Complaints about increases in malpractice insurance rates for physicians must include the discussion of executive compensation among insurers as a huge part of the equation. Aside from the acknowledgement that insurers generously fund political campaigns and constitute the single largest and most effective lobbying effort in the country, one is still left wondering why it would be perceived as politically astute to omit the obvious discussion of executive compensation and industry lobbying. When pointing a finger at stratospheric insurance rates for individuals and the small businesses that include many physicians’ practices, it seems fool-hardy to ignore one of the root causes of systematic increases.
Due to insurance lobbying efforts, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) currently allows our wealthiest, most stable populations to “opt-out” of costs of chronic illness, abandoning the highest risk individuals and smaller businesses to cope on their own, thereby resulting in greater pressure on local resources and revenues. Given that small business is the most robust, most effective engine in any economy, does it make sense for members of Congress to allow this to stand? Perhaps only to the degree that large business funds their campaigns.
Individual state high risk pools for the chronically ill are often mistakenly believed to be funded by the state in which they exist. This is not the reality. It is the unfortunate subscribers of these pools who actually carry the burden of such “membership” upon being locked out of traditional, less expensive insurance plans. These are not individuals who, in general, have made the poor “lifestyle choices” so touted by insurance lobbyists, but rather individuals who contract illness through no fault of their own, and who count members of the small business community among their numbers.
Essentially, current ERISA policy protects insurers from the obligation to insure and does so at the expense of future and current patients. Now is the time to call for transparency in the nation’s insurance lobbying, ERISA law, and executive compensation if we are to ever see fair treatment of all Americans, especially of the working middle-class Americans who always carry the cost of such policy blunders.
One of the greatest strengths of the insurance industry is the average American’s lack of time to pursue knowledge, health, and family matters in order to protect corporate interest at the expense of our society.
Karen Fraase speaks very plainly and clearly on the matter of the cost of providing health care coverage for Americans. In addition, I would add that administrative costs of the insurance companies and the medical providers also add to the cost we all pay for medical care. Every provider has to have staff to file and process claims and payments, and every insurance company has overhead for claims processing. I am not convinced that this is the most efficient system we could have!