Do Americans Really Want Universal Health Insurance?

A recently released Gallup poll on healthcare was simultaneously right and wrong. It got statistically correct answers but asked the wrong questions.

Fifty-seven percent of the 1,020 adults polled responded that "the federal government should ensure all Americans have healthcare coverage," presumably insurance. Despite assigning healthcare responsibility to Washington, 53 percent wanted private insurance rather than government-supplied. The article shied away from stating an inconvenient truth: what Americans say they want will not achieve what they really want and need.

Most Americans do not distinguish healthcare from health care. As one word, healthcare refers to a massive system that consumes 18 percent of U.S. GDP. As two words, health care means medical care, an intimate voluntary commercial service relationship between a patient and a physician. Americans don't really care about healthcare — they want health...care, whatever they need when they need it.

Common wisdom says that people with insurance get care, and people without don't. Common wisdom is wrong. History shows the exact opposite, called the seesaw effect. As more people are covered by government-run insurance programs, access to care goes down!

Any system where Washington is responsible for ensuring universal coverage won't get Americans what they truly want: timely, quality medical care.

"Democrats have floated a number of different policy ideas to find a way to ensure greater health coverage through the power of the federal government." After passage of President Obama's signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he did admit that Obamacare would reform health insurance, not care, as he had promised repeatedly before March 23, 2010.

Medicare (1965), Medicaid (1965), the Emergency Medical Transport and Labor Act (EMTALA, 1986), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996), and, the ACA (2010) are well known, presumably well intended healthcare acts.

The end result is what we have now. Timely health care is both unaffordable and unavailable.

Medicare will be insolvent within five years. People with Medicaid die waiting in line for care, as do our veterans with Tricare, also government-supplied, insurance. EMTALA created the unfunded mandate that is forcing closure of rural hospitals. HIPAA failed to make insurance portable and, worse, obstructs communication between health care professionals. Before the ACA, average maximum wait time to see a primary care physician was 99 days; after the ACA was implemented, the wait increased to 122 days.

If the federal government subsidizes full private coverage for all Americans, the price tag will be even greater than Bernie Sanders's projection for his single-payer system — $40 trillion. Forty trillion dollars is slightly less than half the combined GDP of all nations on Planet Earth.

Do I want to go to the doctor any time I want, be seen, get the treatment I may need, and not have to worry about a bill after the fact? Yes, everyone does. That's a stupid question.

Do I want to go through whatever it takes to enable the immense amount of funding and manpower necessary to enable that? Much more complex, and if you want to carry it to its logical end, you must compel doctors and nurses to provide labor to other people through force of government.

Really though, in five years, would it be that difficult to create an AI-powered triage system that could take much of the drudgery work out of the hands of humans and drastically expand access to some sort of basic medical care? Probably not. I would bet computer-attendant exam rooms will start showing up in ERs around the country by that point for handling cough and fever cases and maybe even simple prescriptions.

The problem as I see it is that there are two competing interests:

The Health Insurance industry wants your money but will do anything they can to avoid paying out. Exceptions to care and deductibles help them to reduce costs considerably.

And then there are the medical institutions, hospitals and doctors. They want to bill us as much money as possible for every little thing. They are less interested in curing patients and more interested in treating them. A cured patient is a lost customer.

We are stuck in the middle, costs are being driven higher by guaranteed premiums under ACA, and everyone wants their slice of the pie.

This is exactly the same reason that college costs have soared since the introduction of college loans. Getting the government out of the healthcare industry is paramount if we want to rescue costs. Let the medical institutions business fight each other for our business, we know that competition lowers costs and improves service.

The government needs to get out of the way.

Too many people getting health care for little or nothing. Most screwed up system in the world.

Why does every other developed nation in the world have a reasonably successful health care system and we have this abortion?

Why? Greed. Nobody on the gravy train is giving up the gravy train.

That is all I have to say. It will never make things any better and they will never be any better. In fact, what we have to look forward to is worse all the time.

The problems with health care in the U.S. are that it's too expensive, we pay a metric schitload of money and get little in return. As with anything else, follow the money and see where it leads you. In the case of health care it's insurance companies. Obamacare was a giveaway to health insurers, they have every congressman and senator in their pockets so that should be expected. Who wouldn't want congress to make it illegal not to buy your product?

Not surprisingly it's difficult to research the amount that insurers skim off the top to administer your health care, that number is well hidden. I'll bet anything that it's a lot though. What we have now is a system where you give a small fortune to an insurance company with the promise that they'll pick up the tab, naturally they skim some off the top. They've figured out that's a license to steal so insurance becomes a bigger and bigger part of the picture while actual health care gets rationed more and more. It's unsustainable, patients aren't getting the care they need while doctors and nurses are squeezed and overworked on the other end. The giant pig of insurance, which provides no actual medical benefit to the patient, meanwhile gets fatter and fatter by taking bigger and bigger cuts of the money passing between patients and providers.

Just check Canada's website for the wait times for hip and knee replacements for example. I waited for two weeks between diagnosis and replacement in Northern Virginia.

However, think about the degradation of quality of life in pain by waiting for months and not weeks, waiting for a replacement.

No.....while our health care system is a patchwork because of government interference, it's far superior to Canada or the UK's version.

I knew a Canadian that lived in the USA and she was always spouting off about how great Canada was. One time I got fed up and said “So how come you are living here then?”

“Oh - my husband can’t find a job in Canada.”

And then there was the time she was complaining about how expensive healthcare was in the USA, and how great Canada was, etc.

“Well - maybe you should go get the procedure done in Canada.”

“Oh - it’s not for me - it’s my dad. He lives in Canada but he would have to wait 6 months for the procedure up there so he came down here. But it is crazy the price of it in the USA...”

Idiot.

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