In his Feb. 15 commentary on health care, New York Times’ Paul Krugman dissected the "dysfunctional nature" of our health insurance system. Krugman says it is a "system in which resources that could have been used to pay for medical care are instead wasted in a zero-sum struggle over who ends up with the bill."
Krugman believes our current system is "an arms race between insurers, who deploy software and manpower trying to find claims they can reject, and doctors and hospitals, who deploy their own forces in an effort to outsmart or challenge the insurers. And the cost of this arms race," Krugman says, "ends up being borne by the public, in the form of higher health care prices and higher insurance premiums" The only thing Krugman might have added is that health insurance is like hunger insurance — designed to protect you against something that might happn. There are no ifs, ands, buts, mightbes or maybes — everyone, sooner or later, is going to need a doctor and/or will go to the hospital. Take a look at where we spend the health dollar — not that much of it goes to health providers, the nurses, doctors, surgeons and hospitals. A great big chunk of it goes to "profit" for the insurance companies and the drug manufacturers, leaving out, of course, 46 million people who are not insured.
We don’t need insurance companies at all. Universal health care with a single-payer — the Federal government — would be far less expensive. But things will have to get a lot worse before people can be convinced that this is the way to go.
What would all those insurance executives do for jobs?
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