US Universal Healthcare is Law – Next step is a strategy to reduce costs
Universal healthcare is a moral imperative in the USA. Here we have a market that has failed us, so it is ethical to try something new. The passage of the bill in Washington is an historic event.
One issue though that must be dealt with is that of prices. The new law will try to control the prices charged by health insurance companies.
This however is only a half a plan, only two sides of a corral to hold in a herd of horses.
Current attempts are aimed toward controlling prices at the distribution end of the healthcare industry, that is, with insurance companies. These insurers have made tremendous profits in the last few years, so it is right to mitigate their price gouging.
One should also direct attention to the production or manufacturing end of the problem. Here we have makers of drugs, MRI machines, blood test machines, supplies, tools, scalpels and so on that sell goods at extremely high prices. If we are to get a handle on the current cost problem, manufacturing needs some treatment. This would involve a general program of breaking up monopolies, giving tax breaks for investment and R and D, giving large government contracts to firms that produce cheaper quality products, limiting patent periods and so on. What has happened is the market mechanism is not operating well in the production end of the healthcare industry, so what we need is more competition, more investment, more research, more innovation. This will then drop prices and bring us more machines, drugs and supplies that are cheaper and of good quality.
In addition the current FDA must be expanded many times to do a proper job for the flood of new drugs sent out for testing in approval. And further this new FDA should not be controlled by the drug companies as the present agency is. Some sort of Federal healthcare department will need to be set up, preferable one staffed and run directly by non-corporate personnel, by non-politicians, by doctors and by experts in their fields.
Overall, what we are going to have in the USA is a healthcare system that is part profit and part nonprofit: Nonprofit to get healthcare to everyone, and profit-oriented to reduce the prices of that healthcare.
Healthcare is an expanding issue because it is a Human imperative. All of us want longer life and better quality of life, health is the infrastructure of a life itself. And healthcare includes very importantly mental healthcare in this day and age.
In fact, healthcare is the infrastructure of the entire economic infrastructure because without good health for a nation you cannot have education, communication, roads and so on – because people have to make these things happen...things don’t make things happen.
This is all merely an extension of the Human desire to “survive”. Corporations have their need to survive but people have their need to survive too, one survivalism will trump the other.
Industry experts currently are against preventative healthcare because it will cost too much; longer living patients contract more diseases and increase expenses for insurance companies. But the fact is that Human need and desire will win out, and healthcare will continue to grow in modern economies. The share of GDP will expand some day to 20% and beyond. One day healthcare will be formalized as a constitutional right. This is the next stage of our moral evolution where we will set out new “forbiddens” – “Thou shalt not deny any Human being healthcare”.
Let us think in new terms now -- using the market to bring us new technologies at lower prices; putting a lab and clinic on every corner; connecting profit and nonprofit into a workable system; putting healthcare related agencies under the direct control of experts and the citizens; treating healthcare as an inviolable Human right.
Cage Innoye
Axxiad News