MEDICAL REFORM: TIME FOR A "STRANGE BEDFELLOWS" COALITION

519 words

Public discussion of medical reform may have gotten more intelligent lately, but the legislation making its way through Congress has become increasingly outlandish. Recent reductions in the proposed fines for individuals who do not buy insurance totally undermine the purpose the fines were intended to serve. If all individuals are not required to get insurance it will be impossible to require insurers to sell policies without regard to preexisting conditions, an essential part of any reforms.

The legislation currently on the table will take our intolerable situation in medicine and make it even worse. It creates a hodgepodge of employer mandates, individual mandates (with exceptions!), taxpayer-funded subsidies, taxes on medical equipment, providers, and even on some insurance plans. We should not even be considering anything this complicated!

If we are going to require that everybody be insured, why not just go for a taxpayer financed single-payer system and be done with it? This would simplify life, minimize complexity, and eliminate all of the transaction costs involved in privately purchased insurance. (Putting the private insurance companies out of business should not be a deal-breaker. Life is tough. After enduring the bankruptcy of airlines, auto companies, and banks, we should not hesitate to put the insurance companies out of their misery if it is what the public welfare requires.)

President Obama’s unwise promise that taxes would not be raised on the vast bulk of the population has forced him to take a single-payer system “off the table” and to deny the obvious fact that compulsory purchase of private insurance is also a tax increase.

A single-payer system would require that taxes be increased on the general population, since there are not enough rich people to finance such a system no matter how much they are soaked. But increased taxes to support a single-payer system might command widespread public support since they would be offset by reductions in the payments people now are making to medical providers and insurance companies.

A powerful educational campaign would be necessary to convince people to support such a general tax increase. Such a campaign cannot succeed overnight. It would have to overcome the unfortunate fact that most people have no idea how much medical insurance is already costing them since a large percentage of the money is being paid on their behalf by employers, reducing the amount they would otherwise pay as wages. This misperception of what insurance is already costing us in reduced wages is probably the single biggest impediment to fixing our current problems.

Time will be needed to build the public understanding and support that will allow Congress to enact a single-payer system. The highest priority now must therefore be to prevent the current legislative proposals, which could permanently block real reforms, from being enacted. The obvious way to do this is for supporters of a single-payer system to join with conservative opponents of any real reforms to form a majority against the current proposals.

Coalitions of strange bedfellows are common enough in politics, for better or for worse. This is one time when such a coalition will be a really good idea.