Healthcare and legalized theft

DAVE COLAVITO
Posted 4/12/17

It’s getting harder to breathe in the air of condescension. You need to understand that affordable accessible healthcare can’t exist without profitable insurance companies—on the …

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Healthcare and legalized theft

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It’s getting harder to breathe in the air of condescension.

You need to understand that affordable accessible healthcare can’t exist without profitable insurance companies—on the agenda of stabilizing markets, age-banding and actuaries, you can’t expect human dignity to be a covered option.

Yes, being unable to care for your sick loved one, or for yourself, does come with fear. But it’s more about personal responsibility—and having plenty of choices.

We really do need to get government out of healthcare so the private market can work its magic—caring for us all, as only it can do.

I find the part about magic intriguing. That’s because mentally healthy adults, outside of duress, don’t knowingly purchase anything consequential without knowing what it costs beforehand. The means devised by private insurers for lowering this barrier to profits? Sever patients, often in duress, from informed financial decision-making.

By making it prohibitive for patients to assess, in advance, their costs from network providers, comparison pricing becomes all but impossible. A helluva business model, it forces patients to pay more than they need to, more they can afford, or avoid seeking care. No other purchase in life will be made for a price so unavailable to them until after they purchase it.

It is legalized theft.

In Washington, the majority party’s disdain for regulation deflects scrutiny from this industry abuse like a Star Trekian force field. And just like Klingon biology, it’s an abuse with backup systems:

You receive healthcare within your insurance network, yet non-network “billing entities” emerge that your policy won’t cover. Your insurer can’t, or won’t, tell you in advance what your costs will be through their provider—“how can I be billed?” you ask—or they generate an estimate that differs from your eventual charge by more than 100%. You later learn from the New York State Department of Financial Services—the oversight authority on such matters—that insurers aren’t required to provide patients estimates.

What will “repeal or replace Obama Care” eventually do to address this? Remember the force field. For most of us, located as we are on the wrong side of it, life in the cost-estimate-vacuum is dangerous, prospects for a private market solution, remote.

Although Starship Enterprise cannot beam you aboard, help in the galaxy exists. The New York Health Act (A4738/S4840), if enacted by Albany, would provide medically necessary services to all New Yorkers. By aggregating existing federal and state funding with the public’s ability to pay, it would eliminate insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays for individuals and employers; remove patient network restrictions; permit providers to organize and negotiate rates in a single-payer system; and incentivize quality of care over quantity of tests and procedures, thereby reducing overall costs—not merely shifting them—currently driven by private insurance overhead and abuse.

Like Captain Kirk with his phaser gun, these measures also take aim at the Medicaid funding obligation of upstate county property taxpayers, vaporizing it into the carpet.

For his part, Congressman John Faso’s recent attempt to address that obligation also demonstrated his willingness to exert federal authority over a state matter. It was, at the same time, also at odds with his stated belief in greater flexibility for states to address their own healthcare needs. Had it succeeded, it would have led either to reduced New York State Medicaid services or a cost shift to higher income taxes for all of us. It’s just the latest version in what’s becoming familiar Fasonian policy jujitsu, and—oy veh—it’s getting dizzying.

[Dave Colavito is a resident of Rock Hill, NY.]

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