Obamacare Makes Me Sick

On March 23, 2010 President Obama signed a bill dealing with medical issues that might have reasonably been called a “health-care add-on bill” or a “health-care supplemental bill” or, even more accurately, a “health-care stupefyingly muddled bill”.  But it was not.  Instead it bore the title of “health-care reform bill” and, that being the case, I would have thought that it contained, in fact, some semblance of reform.  Maybe I’m missing something-in common with our legislators who passed it, I have not read the bill’s 2,700 pages-but, to my knowledge, no where in the bill are the changes that would be required to significantly improve the workings of our broken-down medical system.    Legitimate reform would have had to include the following:

 a) A basic simplification of the entire patient-company-doctor-hospital-primary insurance company-supplemental insurance company-Medicare-Medicaid-veterans’ administration-government agencies mess.  Just the process of handling paperwork between all these “actors” consumes an enormously wasteful toll in terms of dollars, manhours, and frustration.  One has only to visit a doctor’s office and gage the size of his clerical staff to get some idea of the oppressive overhead the industry bears unnecessarily.

 b) A rationing system that would recognize that some medical interventions are simply unaffordable under a public health system.  These restrictions would include ending the essentially useless, and often cruel, medical procedures employed in heroic attempts to prolong the end-of-life for the terminally ill.  Likewise care for prematurely-born babies should be limited to those cases in which a healthy outcome is anticipated.  Other economies would limitations on expensive drugs, joint replacements, motorized wheel chairs, unnecessary medical tests, and so on.

 c) Putting an end to the rampant Medicare and Medicaid fraud that exists today.  Surely an effective policing effort would save more money than it costs.  It’s frankly mind-boggling that Congress could institute a multi-billion-dollar system without proper precautions taken beforehand.  Apparently our lawmakers are so virtuous themselves that the suspicion that others might be less so never entered their innocent minds.

 d) Tort reform.  So obvious that no further explanation is necessary.

 e) A revision in the method doctors are reimbursed from payment for individual procedures to payment for general services rendered.

 f) The replacement of inefficient hospital procedures by up-to-date, computerized systems.