PDF When you are up to your neck in alligators, its hard to remember that someone needs to drain the swamp.
The American Alligator
Last week, I wrote about the tax on “Cadillac plans”. This past week, BHO reached an agreement with labor unions, the primary voice of the opposition to taxing so-called “Cadillac plans”. The tax is still there. My suggestion didn’t seem to make it into the discussion. I was busy dealing with alligators. That’s my day job.
One of our carriers had a computer glitch (a nice euphemism) that disrupted coverage for many people. Here is a typical example of the kind of fires we had to put out – a woman went to the doctor’s office and the doctor could feel a lump in her breast but would not order a mammogram because the office had contacted the insurance carrier and had learned (incorrectly) that she had no coverage.
These incidents prompted me to wonder. If we had a single payer health care system, couldn’t we have the same problems?
After all, we will certainly still have computers.
But we won’t have people moving from plan to plan because they changed jobs. We won’t have people losing coverage because they lost their job, or because they got sick, lost their paycheck and therefore could not afford their health insurance premium.
Doctors and hospitals will know who is paying their bills and therefore might show a bit more patience with administrative errors. After all, if a computer error like that should occur in a single payer system, it likely would affect a high percentage of their patients.
There would hopefully be a sense of shared crisis, not one that abandons people in a time of acute need.
Oh, and the tax compromise reached recently. It is still a bad idea. Now it is just an acutely complicated bad idea.
And it will do absolutely nothing to make our health care system less fragmented, less chaotic, and more humane.
It just lets in more alligators and stops up the drain even more.
This is my second visit to this blog!