Be Careful What You Ask for when it Comes to Health Care

[QUINNSCOMMENTARY]

While no candidate for the presidency is coming out for a national health care plan (although the Democrats surely would like to), there are many Americans, especially among liberals, who want a national, government run health care program for all Americans. The goal; everyone is covered. Such a plan would surely do that, but it will do far more. And, by the way, no such program actually works, at least up to American standards.

To get the care they want, when they want it populations covered by such programs must supplement their government coverage and costs for such programs continue to rise as fast as or faster than our current system. The difference of course is that the costs are burried in taxes and shifted to the next generation in the process.

When I was in England last week, I picked up a London paper and read that 100,000 operations were canceled last year, mostly because of limited resources or administrative screw ups of one kind or the other. Depending on where you lived and how well your local health care “trust was run, you may or may not get the care you need. Another article put it more succinctly, health care is rationed. In talking with a local he flatly stated you can’t get by without some kind of supplemental coverage.

In Russia everyone has free care by going to their local clinic and waiting in loooooong lines. If you need something more complicated like surgery, good luck you are pretty much on your own according to some local people.

It seems that each week we hear of more Medicare fraud uncovered (today we learn Medicare ignored its own claims policy and paid out $700 million in erroneous claims and has a 28.9% error rate for claims on medical equipment), simply because the much touted low administrative costs for Medicare are too low and as a result fraudulent claims are simply processed without scrutiny.

Medicare controls costs by arbitrarily deciding what to pay and to limit costs reduces payment to doctors and hospitals. One can only wonder what would happen if all Americans were covered under such a system with no release valve in the private sector. Hey, I have it; we would be like England, or Canada.

Massachusett's much glorified universal coverage mandate has lead not to universal coverage but to ever rising costs that the state can hardly afford.

Be careful what you ask for, you may get it. Never forget, the real problem is not coverage, it is cost and “solving the former without understanding the later is a formula for disaster.:-5:-5