Health Care Utilization

As politicians run around telling you how they are going to increase your taxes by providing universal health care, I wonder why more don’t suggest how they can lower your taxes by implementing important changes in how health care is delivered.

I have a Kaiser HMO health insurance. They seem to put a lot more focus on prevention and early detection in order to minimize the need to intervene with expensive health care down the road. Their physicians are on salary and so have no incentive to do unnecessary care or order unnecessary tests. They are likely to withhold care when care is not needed rather to intervene just because the patient wants them to.

Before our country even considers “Medicare for All”, it needs to ask our politicians how they are going to insure our health care dollars are well spent and how they plan to prevent the delivery of unnecessary health care. Unnecessary health care is extremely expensive and there are plenty of incentives in our current Medicare system to encourage such behavior.

So what controls will they have in the Medicare system to encourage prevention and early detection? If those controls fail, who will suffer besides the patient and taxpayer? What controls do they have to insure doctors that abuse the system are banned from the system? How will they detect physicians that abuse the system by delivering unnecessary care? If they have tools in place today, what are they? Why are they not working?

There are so many problems in the Medicare system today, that it seems politicians are oblivious to. What politician if they understood the problems in our Medicare system would be suggesting “Medicare for All”? Consumers are generally happy with the health care they get from the Medicare system, but what are they using to judge it against? Do they know when they got care that was unnecessary or their outcome was less than it should have been?

Simply said, we should demand the politicians push Medicare to become the most cost efficient health care deliver system in the country (not with respect to administrative costs but total cost per patient) before they start pushing more people into the system.

Show at a demographic level that their prevention programs and early detection programs are working efficiently to reduce the incidence of high cost health care procedures. Show that the elderly are getting healthier on an age adjusted basis. Why push a program that only pays claims when what we want is a “health care” system?