Less Gov't, Not More Best for US Medicine

My dentist knows that I work in politics, so we talk a lot about healthcare policy when I’m in his chair. (Or if I’ve been bad with brushing and flossing that year, he talks and I just listen.)

Last time I needed a cavity filled he described to me the problem of over-care, where providers perform unnecessary medical procedures.

At best, over-care is wasteful and fraudulent: Providers know they can scam a few dollars out an insurance company. At worst, it can actually harm the patient.

In dentistry, he explained, needless X-rays can expose people to excessive radiation thereby increasing cancer risk. When unethical doctors know they can get away with something insurance companies feel obligated to pay for, you get over-care.

The problem — I responded after my cavities had been filled — is that the commonly accepted media narrative is that doctors are the good guys and insurance companies are the bad guys. That reductivist worldview makes it hard to ever convince people insurance companies should say no.

Moreover, the bigger, more powerful, and more distant an organization is, the more comfortable people might feel ripping it off, I continued.

Most doctors probably wouldn’t rip off a patient directly, but scam an insurance company? Well, that’s fine.

Of course it isn’t fine. When providers perform unnecessary medical procedures — essentially stealing from insurance companies — it depletes resources that could be better spent elsewhere. It also drives up premiums, thereby indirectly harming everyone.

And there’s no organization bigger, more powerful, and more distant than the federal government.

I was reminded of this when I saw a recent piece in The New York Times, where former Cigna VP Wendell Potter announced he’s become a born-again believer in socialized medicine. He posits that the industry puts profits over patients, that the “consumerist” approach to healthcare failed.

He insists that the recent assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was “tragic” while simultaneously blaming insurance companies for unnecessary deaths.

“I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I was playing a leading role in a system that made desperate people wait months or longer to get care in animal stalls or go deep into medical debt,” he writes.

He’s written books on how the private insurance industry is “deceiving” Americans. These books are easy to sell because the corporate media drools over the opportunity to promote any defector to the cause of socialized medicine. While Potter may be making a lot of money for himself with this change of heart, he’s promoting a position that will cost everyone else tons.

While the Affordable Care Act was sold to us 15 years ago as the solution to America’s healthcare Gordian knot, its red tape has left us more tied up than ever. Premiums have skyrocketed as health insurance has become a bank-breaking necessity.

Benefits have shrunk, the expense of treatment has increased, options have been reduced, and the doctor-patient relationship has been even further strained by the billing codes and arcane databases. Meanwhile health insurance companies have raked in record profits under a measure that was to make health care more affordable.

The solution to our unmanageable health \care morass is the same solution to virtually everything: decentralization and transparency. The more decentralization, the more competition. The more transparency, the more accountability.

This is certainly easier typed that done, but as the federal government has overwhelmed more and more of our healthcare system, we’ve endured less competition, less transparency, and ever-increasing costs.

Strangely enough, so-called progressives’ solution is always claiming more and more power for themselves — they can brush off the shortcomings of ACA’s failures because it didn’t go far enough. Meanwhile, some doctors give their patients cancer with unnecessary X-rays because insurance companies have been scared out of saying no.

This system cannot continue. The federal government spends more on healthcare than on defense, meaning our socialized medicine is a threat to national security and world stability. We need the federal government in less of medicine, not more.