Hasty Health Care

I came into the break room at the Herald at noon the other day and Rachel Hamann was in the middle of preparing her standard low-calorie meal of shredded greens. I asked her how she could stand to eat that stuff day after day. She gave me an unforgettable answer: Life is difficult and I have to choose my pain; I can either suffer with this, or I can suffer with being overweight.
Americans have a worldwide reputation for being willing to pay the price in order to achieve something of value. This is summed up in the adage, There is no free lunch.
Putting this in the context of the health care debate currently raging, the Administration and the majority in Congress contend that we can provide medically underserved people with needed health care without adding to our tax burden.
They assert that this can be done by bringing efficiencies to our health care system, thus creating the proverbial “free lunch.”
The rationale offered is, the private sector is wasteful and unnecessarily expensive, and if the government runs it, this will be corrected, and we can use the savings to pay for those in need. This answer defies what history has taught us. Over the last century a number of nations thought that government could run things better and tried it. That experiment failed, and failed miserably.
Why? Because there is no incentive for government employees to burn the midnight oil to create efficiencies, whereas in the private sector, only the highest-quality and best-price providers of goods and services win out, and the rest die out.
When government takes things over, it usually doesn’t allow competitors. They are not forced to innovate and to keep prices down…so quality suffers and prices go up.
Look how many people used to be telephone operators in Cape May County, and what we used to pay for long-distance calls (I used to pay 26 cents per minute in the 1960s to call from New Mexico to Patricia in Georgia). Government-run phone companies around the world have all been forced to close, along with just about every other government-run company.
Americans are smart, hard-working people.
When government doesn’t get in our way, we constantly are learning how to do everything better, faster and cheaper. Yes, our health care system doesn’t function well, but that is because the insurance companies pay the bills. Where medical bills are paid out of our own pockets, we are much more thrifty.
I work with Preston Gibson here at the Herald. He shared with me the recent experience of his relative. The relative was prescribed Zocor to help manage his cholesterol levels. Since this is likely to be a chronic condition, he wanted to get the lowest possible price – especially since he didn’t have a prescription plan included in his health care coverage.
At a major chain pharmacy, he was told a 30-day supply of Zocor would cost $120, a generic equivalent would cost $60. He made inquiries at several other pharmacies before going to a discount chain’s pharmacy where he found a 90-day supply of the generic for less than $10. So, on an annualized basis he was able to fill the prescription for less than $40, instead of $1,440. Thus, his out-of-pocket cost to fill this prescription was far less than his insurance co-pay would’ve been for the Zocor brand. He actually saved money by NOT having prescription insurance!
The way for us to address the health care issues is to take the time to calmly discuss all the issues with all points of view represented at the table. Something costing trillions drafted by one political party is a formula for financial disaster.
Art Hall, publisher
P.S: Note, in this whole debate, we are overlooking the fact that the U.S. Constitution forbids the federal government from entering into any area not specifically enumerated, which makes health care a matter for the states, not a federal issue.