How about a little of both?
I don’t see, for instance, why we can’t have universal coverage and malpractice reform. In a similar vein, MIT’s Jonathan Gruber writes a great op-ed in the Boston Globe recently, about controlling health spending.
One one side, progressives generally want to reform the supply side spending of medical care, which means pressuring the payments made to doctors and hospitals. On the other, conservatives want patients, or health care consumers as they call them, to have more of a financial stake in their health care use.
As Mr. Gruber notes, “both sides in this debate need each other. Liberals are right that fundamental cost control can only come from the supply side . . . But here is where conservatives are right: Consumers will reject such cost controls unless they have some skin in the game.”
He goes on to cite the failure of HMOs and managed care in the early 1990s, not because they didn’t work, but because patients rebelled against being restricted on which doctor they were allowed to see. He argues that, as long as patients continued to be insulated from the true costs of health care, it’s unlikely that any supply-side cost control measure will be accepted by the public.
I wholeheartedly agree, and suggest you read the entire op-ed.
Related posts:
- Ideas for health care reform
- The Liberal who believes that health care is not a right
- Ideas for reform
- Medicare and cutting health care costs
- Rationing care is inevitable to control health care costs
- AMA: Curbing the rise in health care costs is key to health-system reform
- Health care costs 101
{ 4 comments }
Single payer would be far superior to even the public option. There is need for a physician run health care system. As it is and even with reform without the public option, the system is an insurance company run health care system.
US Medical Insurance Companies stand between patients & physicians, rationing care for profit & dictating treatment decisions to physicians.
This makes it curently an insurance run health care system. Reform puts physicians and patients back in charge.
Wow Kevin, you opened up a big can of worms on this one!
It would be nice if Conservatives and Liberals found some compromise between extremes, but I expect the flame war on the comments here to get pretty nasty. We might even get some partisans comparing the other side to Nazis!
Makes me glad to be an independent. I can sit back and enjoy the show.
Wow, no fireworks at all! Kind of disappointing. I was hoping to watch Dems and Repubs fight it out.
How about we study the terrain and then draw a map to fit it instead of the other way around. Forget conservative-liberal labels. Lets examine the reality that we are dealing with and start there.
The first reality to recognize is basic human nature. That is afterall what we are dealing with here. All the livers, hearts, and kidneys are treating belong to people with will, passions, and intense self-interests driving them. Likewise with the people providing the care,and the people providing the funds. One problem with medicare is that is based on silly notions about the nature of people–the idea that you could put a big pot full of money in a room, tell people just to take their fair share of what they need, and that they will not try to out grasp each other in an escalating gluttony war. Or the tendency for people to sabatoge efforts to tell them what to do. Or the fact that people will, quite commonly, lie when money is at stake. Or the fact that no amount of collectivist propaganda will persistently and permanently disabuse people of the instinctive notion that the product of their labor and it’s products are theirs to own and disposes of–not their neighbors.
The second set of realities are financial. Like the simple reality that if we contrive a set of preventive measures and preventive meds that will add ten years to everyones life, we can not provide them to everyone if they cost more than the average person earns in a lifetime.
Then we can apply those realities to values. Ownership. Freedom. Security. Charity. Decide which of these will guide our navigation of the realities. That brings us back to human nature: We don’t have the same values. Which well highlights the value of the high place of freedom and ownership in healthcare.
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