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HEALTH REFORM: The Health Agenda of a Hockey Mom
We just posted an item about how health played at the conventions. Now for those of you who want to learn something about Gov. Sarah Palin's health reform history, here's some recommended reading.
The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both look at her record on health care in Alaska, and find it's fairly slim. Her focus was naturally in keeping with her free market philosophy. She pushed for more transparent information for consumers, and waged an unsuccessful fight to end the state's certificate of need rules, even after an expert panel she appointed recommended that the CoN law remain on the books.
Critics of CoN laws, Palin included, say they add another layer of government regulation that impedes competition and keep prices artificially high. Backers say they encourage overutilization and high prices. Hospital sometimes argue that they will be hurt if smaller clinics are allowed to compete for profitable services like MRIs but not pick up the less profitable or money-losing services, like caring for the uninsured. Good blog posts on this topic (which explain more about what Certificate of Need means and does) include Bob Laszewski's here and Joe Paduda's here.
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California Legislators Proxies for Providers in Reform War
When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order this year stopping a practice known as balance billing it was only a matter of time before there was going to be a lashback against insurers. Balance billing is a practice where health care providers such as emergency room doctors and anesthesiologists, that rarely belong to contracted insurance networks that protect beneficiaries by standardizing billing procedures, add extra charges that may make their services cost several times what they would have in a contracted network even though no disclosure was made or possible due to the urgent nature of the services provided. Even if such disclosure was possible, most people would pay anything to be saved from a traumatic or lethal condition, and so all too often they do.
The United States is the only country in the world where health care is not regulated like a utility. Insurers are limited to what they kinds of profits they can make from their beneficiaries in a growing number of states, even though the same kind of reforms have never even been attempted with health care providers. Unfortunately this is like taking credit for stopping a hole in a bucket when the bucket keeps on getting tipped over. Health care beneficiaries have been subjected to a vicious war for decades now as providers seek to maintain their status as wealthy super-elites that can implement any kind of billing practices they want without restraint or even practicing good medicine.
This week the California legislature passed a bill that would force health insurers to spend 85% of their health insurance premiums on benefits to beneficiaries in the theory that insurance companies retention of vast pools of money are driving up the cost of health care. Unfortunately, this piecemeal approach to health care reform doesn't even begin to address the root causes of the health care crisis, not of uninsured, but paying more per person than any other country in the world on a health care system that only delivers the care it should be about 50% of the time.
It is doubtful that anyone in the California legislature has an answer to why they danced on the pile of pick up sticks that is our health care system while holding the insurance stick up to show the rest of their savage and ignorant tribe that they had succeeded in vanquishing the monster.
Sarah Palin
I find it hard to agree with Sarah Palin on alot of things. This is one of them. How can someone with a slim record know what to do about health care for others?