By David R. Webb, MD
Object to your tax dollars going to pay administrators of Medicare/Medicaid programs? How then do you feel about your ever-increasing insurance premiums going to pay the ever-increasing salaries of for-profit health insurance company CEOs? In the last decade for which figures are available, CEO’s at the 10 largest of these companies pocketed nearly $1 billion in compensation. As a group, they received a 167% pay raise in a single year, while average American workers saw wages grow about 2%.
Don’t like the idea of “government” intrusion in decisions about your health care? How then do you feel about “quality of life” as well as “life-and-death” medical decisions being made for you in the board rooms of these corporations?
In this electoral season, we have been subject to a barrage of slick campaign rhetoric, largely funded by well-heeled politicians and their well-heeled corporate sponsors, much of it negative, much of it misleading if not frankly distorted. I find the most outlandish of all to be State Representative Greg Davids’ claim to be “working to lower health care costs.”
In 40 years as a physician, I have worked as a commissioned officer in the United States Public Health Service – a socialized medical system, in a traditional private practice, and as an employee in hospital/clinic-based regional health care systems. I have witnessed many wondrous advances in medical science and technology and at the same time, a disheartening lack of progress, even set-backs, in our willingness and ability to deliver the benefits of those advances to everyone in need. From personal experience, I can state unequivocally that nothing has wasted more of my professional time that could have been devoted to more meaningful activity, nothing has contributed more to the unnecessary exorbitant overhead costs of providing health care, and nothing has been a greater intrusion into the sacred trust between doctor and patient than the fragmented, multi-payer, for-profit health insurance business that Mr. Davids espouses.
The business model is straightforward – you maximize profit by enhancing revenue and reducing costs. In the health insurance industry, that means increasing premiums, reducing compensation to providers, and most egregiously, denying services to subscribers. For every anecdotal complaint Mr. David may cite about bureaucratic inefficiency, folks falling through reimbursement cracks, and so forth, there are scores of real-life tragedies. I recall, for example, a colleague’s arguing on the phone, trying to get an insurance company’s approval for a hospital admission. In utter exasperation he finally said, “Wait. I’m handing the phone to this lady who is bleeding all over my office floor. You tell her why I can’t put her in hospital.” Sadly, in the last decade or so of my career, this type of butting heads with insurance company “gatekeepers” became the bane of nearly every work day.
Mr. Davids is an insurance salesman endorsed by the National Association of Insurance & Financial Advisors. What is he really fighting for? Obviously, vested interests. His favored scheme of having more for-profit insurance companies to go after your health care dollars is not the solution to rising health care costs; rather, it lies at the very heart of the problem. I find it appalling that he of all people is in a position to co-chair the Legislative Oversight Committee for MNsure, a program to which he is committed to underfund and to undermine.