Doctors Support Health Care Reform

Symbol for the Medical Sciences

Health Care is a science issue. Beyond the higher-purposes of discovery and enlightenment, science provides daily improvements to our quality of life through improved agriculture, technological conveniences, and a better understanding of our place in the Cosmos. A large part of this endeavor is the enhancing and extending our quality of life through the medical sciences, but in America the system is barring many of us from enjoying the fruits of the medical profession’s labors.

America has the highest per capita health care costs of any other industrialized nation, spending 44 percent more on health care than the nation with the second highest costs, Switzerland. Yet, we get fewer physician visits and shorter hospital stays on average compared to most other industrialized nations. 40 million Americans are without insurance, meaning they are one bout of pneumonia away from financial ruin.

The Health Insurance Company practice of rescission, where the companies do not audit the veracity of customer applications until the customer gets sick and needs treatment, at which point they look for any little discrepancy between the policy-holder’s application and their health history to deny them coverage, means there are millions more Americans who think they are covered, but are in for a horrible surprise someday. In one extreme case, a woman was denied breast cancer surgery because she failed to disclose that she had been treated for acne. The federal government refuses to regulate such underhanded, crooked behavior on the part of insurance companies, which means that individuals who have been paying into their health insurance plan for 20 years have a 10 percent chance of being rejected for coverage when they finally need it.

Most of us don’t know this because most of us have employer-sponsored group plans. But thanks to the Information Age, more and more of us are going the self-employed route. I was an independent contractor in Washington DC from 1998 to 2001, responsible for my own health insurance. Juggling that $250 a month bill with my rent, electricity, gas, and lack of steady income was a perpetual stress factor in my life. At the same time, the libertarian news magazine The Economist argues that failing to tax employer-sponsored health care plans has artificially inflated the market in America. In other words, one of the reasons we pay so much for health care in America is because tax-exempt health-policies have made health care cheaper than it should be for those of us lucky enough to be in a company large enough to offer it.

What about that 10% of people insurance companies deny treatments to for failing to understand the cryptic language used on the applications, which even health insurance executives admit they have no idea what they are talking about? We pay for them. Hospitals are required to treat the sick whether they can pay or not, which is why people aren’t dying in the streets currently for lack of coverage. Hospitals recoup this loss by increasing the prices of their services to consumers.

Not only are Americans paying for the health care of people who cannot afford it, at the same time we are subsidizing the health insurance companies that refused to pay for them. Think about that in the context of health insurance companies experiencing a 1,084 percent increase in profits between 2002 and 2006. That’s not socialism; that’s a concept so financially ludicrous as to defy rationality.

But even without all these economic manipulations and diabolical practices, insurance alone is socialism. In a health insurance system, everybody pays for everyone else’s illnesses. The only difference is that we have a for-profit company managing the whole thing instead of the government.

The American Medical Association endorses the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. They do not think the plan to reform health care is perfect, but they understand that the current system is spiraling down into an increasingly worsening state that cannot be supported. When doctors give health advice, wise people listen to them.