Health Care

By Linh K. Dao

Health Care is one of those very complex issues which has been reduced to sound bites and litmus tests. I think the embarrassing Democratic attempt to "Reform" health care is a perfect demonstration of what not to do to correct a serious situation. You've got to know what's going on before you change something............

In the 1940's or thereabouts, the United States had widespread availability of health care which was fairly primitive by today's standards. It wasn't much, so to speak, but nearly anyone could get it. Availability of health care was more a matter of having a doctor in your town, than being able to afford one.

By the 1960's, pretty good health care was generally available, thanks in great part to the availability of reasonably priced medical insurance. The medical insurance industry had funded the development of our health care system by making access possible.

Now we have astoundingly sophisticated medical resources which are becoming less available because costs have gone out of sight. The attempt to use the HMO concept to reduce costs has served to reduce the number of hospital beds, cut trauma center availability and deny treatment to many on the basis of economic considerations. It is also tending to restrict medical access based upon actuarial life expectancy rather than individual natural life span. There is now an economic disincentive to prolong life.

The problem with the health care system is that it is more complex than campaign mentalities can handle. It is a complex system whose components have developed in different ways over the years and have outgrown the funding structures that used to make them available. Modern medicine, as it is now funded, devours money.

Before that can be restructured into something efficient and universally accessible, the fundamental economic and functional relationships among insurers, health care providers, diagnostic technologies, treatment technologies and medical research have to be clearly understood in the context of our current economic patterns.

The insurers and professionals in the health care system aren't bad guys. They are facing what has become an impossible task. We need to understand the system clearly, understand what the real cost of accessible quality health care would be, and decide openly, as a democracy, how much of our GNP we are willing to put into our health.

Then we need to build a health care system that meets the personal, societal and business needs of our nation.