National Health Care Plans

We've been hearing a lot about the two Democratic candidates' national health care plans, with the Pennsylvania primary being hotly contested as I write this. I don't think anyone is going to argue that, in a country as relatively wealthy as ours, someone in desperate need of health care should have to go without medical care only because they can't afford it. But my primary question about health care has remained seemingly ignored by all of the candidates. My question is: what are you going to do to control rising health care costs? Any national health care plan that doesn't address that problem is only shifting costs when the real reason that a national health care plan is so desirable to so many people is that health care is increasingly unaffordable.

I suspect that there are several reasons for this, the main one being that nobody has an answer, and if they do have an answer, it'd be very unpopular with a lot of powerful people. A lot of people would like to blame the insurance industry, but that argument fails quickly. The insurance industry doesn't increase health care costs; it merely has to figure out ways to pay for whatever costs exist.

So what needs to change to stop spiraling health care costs? Some doctors point the finger toward insurance companies because of their rapidly increasing malpractice insurance costs (which means that the doctors in turn must charge more), but that's a short-sighted view. Malpractice costs are high because those dollars used to pay high malpractice suit settlements have got to come from somewhere (and yes, the insurance company will make their profit, as all businesses do). So what is generating those large malpractice suit amounts? Simply put, it's the juries that award them. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be large awards for cases that merit them, but I have to question how many of these large awards are truly justified. We've all heard the story of the elderly woman who won millions in a court settlement by taking McDonald's to court for hot coffee she spilled in her own lap in a drive-through. There are medical malpractice cases that are the equivalent of that.

Bringing medical care costs under control is going to require cooperation at every level of the process, and frankly, somebody's golden goose (and most likely several golden geese) is going to have to be cooked to do it. It's going to take someone with courage and power to accurately identify the real problems and address them, and I don't know what it's going to take to enable that person to step up.

I do know that the candidates aren't going to address the real problems during the primaries, because what the voters want to hear is that someone is going to pay their medical bills, and they don't care who it is as long as it doesn't sound as though it has to be them.