Commentary—

Health Care: It’s Every Man, Woman, Child, Senior Citizen,

Doctor, Nurse, And Hospital For Themselves

By Bill Collins

If you’re sick,

You’re out of luck;

While health care players

Make a buck.

Competition is the genius of America. It makes our nation great. It draws motivated newcomers from all the world to our shores. Indeed, we are so enamored of competition that we even apply it to health care.

Big mistake.

Most of humankind has long since concluded that there are certain critical services best left to government. These include education, defense, highways, water, police, fire, licensing, prisons, and health insurance. Unfortunately, the United States has not yet reached that level of enlightenment on health, except for seniors, veterans, and the penniless. For this intellectual negligence, Americans pay a steep price.

By now, most citizens realize that our cost of health care has grown embarrassingly high, while our life expectancy remains embarrassingly low. That hardly seems fair.

And now, adding insult to injury, there’s a new study showing that Brits, for all their drinking, still live longer than we do. They’re probably toasting that news right now. And this research was duly controlled for poverty, race, and all the usual statistical suspects.

Meanwhile in the United States, according to our custom, insurers still compete, drug makers still compete, hospitals still compete, doctors compete, ambulances compete, clinics compete… everybody competes. Such hallowed competition, in turn, leads to so much duplication of facilities, services, and bureaucracy, that many employers and citizens can no longer afford insurance.

And now, getting into the swing of it, employers are also competing, but their competition is to unload their traditional health plans as fast as they can. Otherwise, they’ll be gobbled up by other investors who will. That leads to more workers going on Medicaid and falling back on hospital emergency rooms. This further stresses the state governments that subsidize those facilities. It’s a mess.

But some states are fighting back. Massachusetts just passed a law punishing any citizen who does not buy insurance, and charging employers a nominal fee for every worker they fail to cover. Observers are skeptical, but who knows?

Maybe they’ve found a solution. We should get an answer fairly soon. Connecticut tried something new this year, too. There was a bill to require large employers, mainly Wal-Mart, to either provide decent insurance or else pay plenty to the state to fill in. Wal-Mart was the main target because most other large employers already do offer a reasonably decent plan.

Nonetheless, it was a useful scheme because even many big companies (read, General Motors, to start) are now unloading those health plans lickety-split. Yes, the bill failed, but expect it back next year, with legs. Virtually every state has developed some plan for care, but as laymen, we sadly don’t hear much evaluation of them.

Plainly, waste is a major issue in all this. Stamford Hospital just sent our household a slick magazine touting its services. Guess who’s paying for that? And we don’t even live in Stamford!

Every day Norwalk Hospital has an ad on the front page of our local paper, and Stamford has one on page 3. Greenwich Hospital is now advertising there, too. Further, UConn Health Center plans a big expansion out there in Farmington to draw suburban patients away from the existing hospitals in Hartford. Very helpful.

Worse, the state agency that’s supposed to control duplication of expensive medical facilities is gradually letting hospitals and clinics do any expensive thing they please. This is a big reason why health care here costs double that in other countries. There are other avarice-based causes too.

Our national policy problem with health is that no one is really in charge. Washington should be, but the special interests there are just too powerful. Those interests are very mighty at the state level, too, but enough authority does reside here to create universal health insurance if we want it. Our population is plenty big enough to support it. What’s missing is the will.

Unfortunately, so many Nutmeggers are making a fine living off our screwed-up system that their lobbyists easily control these issues at the Capitol.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)