More for Less? The absurd logic behind the public option.

by Stanley Goldfarb
12/02/2009

Excerpt:
The reason we have an expensive health care system is due to every part of the health care system. Malpractice costs, great availability of technology and advanced care even in small community hospitals, aggressive care in the last year of life (of course, it is not easy to know it is the last year of life), cross subsidization of medical education and research by large teaching hospitals, innovative therapies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and whose developmental costs must be recaptured, enormous levels of regulation on hospitals and medical providers, and increasing capacity to treat patients with enormously complex medical conditions.

If we ask the health care system to provide each of these components in a fashion that Americans have come to expect and yet demand that it continue to provide all these components with reduced payments, only a catastrophe awaits us. The system is at the breaking point now. Emergency rooms, which are used primarily by those with health insurance as documented in a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in October 2008 are enormously overcrowded. Only about 17 percent of E.R. visits in the United States were by uninsured patients, about the same as their share of the population. Providing universal health insurance coverage would not change the underlying situation. The Urban Institute report would have us believe that reducing payments for emergency services would somehow reduce this problem? the rest