Healthcare Reform...The Long View
I know folks on the right wing side of American politics don't have much concern for the long view...Especially when it conflicts with their slash-and-burn style of politics and their thirst for power...But we'll take a quick look anyways.
Health insurance companies are all about the bottom line. Their profits come from denying payment for health-care. In a report by Goldman-Sachs, Steve Lewis, a broker for one of the world's largest insurance companies, stated that health insurers were more than comfortable pricing people out of the market to maintain their bottom line. But, like the robber barons of old, they...and their supporters...fail to look at the long term consequences. But that should come as no surprise to anyone. The same attitudes led to the ongoing mortgage crisis.
SO let's look at a long term consequence that will devastate the American middle class as well as everyone else further down on the economic food chain.
Health insurers are willing to raise their rates which, in turn, will force more and more people off of insurance roles. The result of this will be n increasing number of people using emergency departments as primary care providers. And this trend will only worsen as more and more people join the ranks of the uninsured. The upshot of this is that emergency departments, and the hospitals which support them, will face increasing demand for services from a growing pool of uninsured patients using them for primary care. These patients often wait until their condition becomes intolerable before seeking health care, thus arriving at the hospital in worse condition and often requiring a more complex course of treatment including longer hospital stays than their insured counterparts. The increased financial burden this creates for a hospital or a local/regional health-care system can force them to close their doors. St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City is a prime example of this. Faced with $75 million annual operating deficits, St. Vincent's was sold to a for profit health chain which will turn the hospital into an outpatient center. Thus closing a major source of health-care not just for the uninsured, but for everyone in Lower Manhattan for more than 150 years.
Now, imagine this repeated across the country in growing numbers...Hospitals and health care systems closing...fewer and fewer sources of health-care for the growing number of insured and uninsured alike, as more and more are forced into the ranks of the uninsured. Until only the very wealthy can afford to have their health care needs attended to at a few private, cash-only centers. Sounds fantastic...? It can never happen here? It can, and will, if meaningful and substantive reform of America's health care system is not passed. And it is how health-care works in many third world countries now. Imagine that...America reduced to third-world status by a short-sighted health-insurance industry and its equally short-sighted backers in Congress.
