In my prior post on why I though the current health reform bill would fail to help most people, SteveK linked to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation with an outrageous claim:
Myth 10: Expanding health insurance coverage to all, or even a large share of the uninsured, will cost far more than the country currently spends on health care.
FACT: Because both the uninsured and government subsidies pay for a good share of their health care costs already, the amount of additional health spending to cover all of the uninsured is relatively small.
Most proposals to expand health insurance do not account for the tax dollars currently being used for the care of the uninsured.
Assuming their health care use would increase once the uninsured gained coverage, that the uninsured would continue to pay for a share of their care, and that current tax dollars could be fully redirected towards insurance — the additional health care spending to cover ALL of the uninsured in 2004 has been estimated to be $48 billion. However, this does not include any administrative costs associated with reforming the system. These new dollars represent only a 3% increase in personal health care spending (which totaled $1.4 trillion in 2003).
This sounds like blasphemy, but I think it’s completely accurate. In fact I’m glad he saved me time, because I was going to write a post that argued precisely this. The conclusion is simple: we just need to give people insurance to those that don’t have it.
OK obviously it’s not that simple, because then it gets into questions about fairness and the like, but the points still stands that the uninsured problem is relatively easy to fix and would have extremely marginal costs once you take into account the money that will be saved by people acting differently since they have insurance.
Even though the currently proposed health care reform is projected to help only a fraction of the uninsured (if at all, the Senate bill may not), that is the main reason people are arguing for it. I’d really like to see proponents explain why the CBO is wrong in their projections instead of just touting the talking point about how bad it is that tens of millions of people are uninsured.
No, the current bill isn’t a bill to help the uninsured, and even if we did cover all of them, that wouldn’t solve the health care crisis. The corollary to the statement above (and the conclusion of my prior post) is that health care inflation is the primary threat, and that will only grow bigger. This is something that the current bill does nothing to solve (again according to the official analyses) and therefore isn’t true reform. We have to be honest: it’s more of a bandaid to keep people from revolting for a few more years. You can argue that it is a noble goal in order for us to come up with a reasonable solution later (just like you can for the economic stimulus and financial bailout that didn’t fix any of the root problems — of which I could slap down twenty graphs and quotes from top officials to show we haven’t made any long term progress) but it’s not being sold that way at all.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but regulatory reform, covering the uninsured and tackling long term price inflation are three separate (although overlapping) issues that I’d like to see tackled independently. That will never happen of course, but the current way is just leading to a squandering of opportunity.