Let’s Try …

Capitalism.

The pundits keeps saying that we need to run government like a business, when they really mean, “let’s raid the Treasury”.

I think it’s time to deal with rising health care costs by using the principles of capitalism, rather than corporatism. First, we need to discover the most efficient health insurance model in the US, and that one is easy. Robert Reich points out that Medicare isn’t the problem. It’s the solution.

At an overhead cost of less than 5%, regular Medicare is the most efficient health care insurance in the US. It isn’t even close. Medicare Parts A and B are the best model for health insurance – it is a simple, demonstrable fact.

Now, Medicare Part C, the so-called Medicare Advantage, is not as efficient. The Trust Fund has to pay 12% more for people in Part C, than those in standard Medicare. The reason is simple, it involves the private sector, and the private sector wants to make profits. So, from a business perspective, Part C should be phased out with everyone put into the cheaper standard Medicare. Given that there are about 10 million people in the program, that extra 12% is a significant amount of money. Part C was supposed to save money, but like all privatizations efforts, it ended up being more expensive.

The last part of Medicare is Part D, the drug program, and it is a total mess. It is another privatization project that is totally inefficient and outrageously expensive. It needs to be totally restructured as a government program, like standard Medicare, that negotiates for drug prices using the power of the 50 million enrollees, just like any other business. That’s how things are done in the capitalist system. Since the DoD and VA also have medical programs and need to buy drugs, they should be combined with the Medicare program to give the negotiators real clout when they are buying from all of the foreign corporations that now manufacture the drugs for the American market. If the process works for WalMart, it would be silly not to use it for Medicare. Of course, you have to favor capitalism to accept that.