The Politics of Healthcare
Intel’s Eric Dishman believes we can save a trillion dollars a year by moving half of healthcare services from hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted care facilities to homes. He calls for a “Going to the Moon” type of effort but knows that such progressive proposals would face strong opposition. Because funding home health care and making effective use of technology depends on the politics of healthcare a supportive regulatory environment, we occasionally post articles on public policy.
Founding Editor Wayne Caswell believes we can save two trillion a year just by becoming “average,” which means cutting our costs to match the other rich nations that spend half as much but still cover everyone and generally get better longevity and outcomes.
Trillion Spent, and Trillions Wasted
Our nation spends over $4 trillion per year ($3.65T in 2018, $4.3T in 2022). That’s nearly twice as much as other industrialized OECD nations. But according to the World Health Organization (WHO), we live sicker and die younger. One way to save trillions per year is to replace most of the need for private health insurance with a single-payer system.
Unlike a true Health care system, our nation’s Sick care system profits when we’re sick, and the incentive is to keep us as paying customers; so the industry works to manage disease, treat symptoms, and pay practitioners for each procedure, test and visit, while other parts of government subsidize agribusiness and processed foods while ignoring poverty and environmental contamination.
As Steve Brill wrote in “Why High Medical Bills are Killing Us,” his 38-page special report for TIME Magazine, there’s no real competition if you can’t compare the outcomes and procedure costs of different hospitals and have no choice but to “pay up” when there’s an emergency.
Follow the money, and you’ll see that it mostly goes to hospitals, insurance companies, drug companies, equipment providers, and testing companies — not doctors. This medical industrial complex spends three times more on lobbying than the military-industrial complex. It’s a massive, money-making industry that doesn’t want to change and instead wants to grow larger. Join me and resist.
Affecting Real Change
A few years ago I proposed a hybrid public/private model of healthcare that I said would save over $1 trillion per year by exploiting different incentives and the benefits of a single-payer system while still leaving plenty of space for innovation and capitalism. Now that would be $2 trillion. I hope you will join the Fight to Rescue America’s Healthcare.
