Lower Health Care Cost? Here’s How.

The buzz in Washington is that we need to lower health care cost and the cost of health insurance. The question is: how exactly do we accomplish that? Figuring out the answers to this difficult question is complicated. But figuring out what not to do is really very easy.

The promise by government to “do something about the high cost of health care,” is a wildly random statement, with no basis for providing results. Maybe Congress can force doctors and providers to accept less money for their services, but at what cost to the quality and availability to the average consumer. Heath care, regardless of how vital it is to the welfare of humanity, is a business, and the potential for profit has provided the motivation and innovation of these businesses to develop the highest level of care anywhere in the world. Health providers want to receive a return on the investment of their time or their dollars, just as every worker expects to be paid for the time spent at their job. Make health care an unprofitable or marginally profitable business, and you will have fewer providers offering medical services, which then limits access, which then drives up cost anyway, but now for a greatly inferior system.

The only way government can affect anything to do with health care is throw money at it. They can regulate aspects of fees and insurance with new laws, for the illusion that they are driving prices down, but when the economics don’t work, they have to supplement their mistakes with the infusion of money to try to keep their imbalanced system from collapsing. Health insurance companies have learned that in order to provide coverage to a large group of people, the risk potential of each participant has to be clearly identified, so that projected claims will not exceed the premiums collected. If government forces insurance carriers to take higher risk people, or as suggested, take everyone regardless of their health, then there will not be enough money to pay for all of those expensive claims. The only fixes at that point is for premiums to go up for everyone, or the government will have to make up the difference to cover these manufactured losses, or allow the current private insurance system to collapse, and then take over the entire health care system with a government run program.

Remember that government is not a business, they do not produce a product and they do not make a profit. They don’t buy and sell at margin and create money, they either take money from you, in the many forms of taxes, or they just print additional money, which leads to massive inflation and reduces our ability to compete in the world economy. If you will be truthful, you cannot name one government program that has ever been run more efficiently than private industry has been able to accomplish in a free market economy, using market forces to help drive and balance the system. To believe that government has the ability, or the desire to make our system better, is delusional. Bureaucrats simply want more control, and control means more dollars for the power pushers in Washington to play with; your dollars, by the way.

If you really want third world quality and inexpensive medical care, cross the border in any direction, or seek it overseas, but don’t support the destruction of our present high level of service, thinking that you can continue to get this same type of care at significantly less cost. That economic principle doesn’t work in any other industry, so why do you believe it would work in health care? You don’t get something for nothing; you get what you pay for; unless of course, the government is paying for part of the cost. When that happens, as clearly illustrated in every government run program, you get much less than what you pay for.