Morality and Health Care: the argument for something better

Is it moral, or ethical to make money off of someone's health? The idea of a person making money off another person's health seems an antiquated idea, like the lawlessness of wild west movies.

The core agreement of health insurance is that you, a person or a family, pay someone else money every month in exchange for that person paying a doctor, nurse, hospital, etc. when you go see them.

The core business principle for that someone (ie-the health care insurance company) is to have more healthy people than sick so that you have enough money to pay for the sick people, and enough left over for you to live on. This doesn't seem so bad.

But then the business principle gets sticky. You want to pay as little money as possible, so you draw imaginary lines to delineate when you have to pay and for what services you have to pay. The trick is to draw the lines in such a way that the person or family paying you still thinks they are getting a deal - so they keep paying you, but you pay as little as possible.

But then the whole thing gets sticker. Enter geographical lines where some health care companies can do business here and there, but not there and over there. You start to get monopolies where, even if you don't like how little that company is paying and if you don't like how much you are paying them, they have the power to force you, or at least heavily influence you and the market around you, to stay with them. Now we are on morally shaky ground. A health insurance company can actually say, "no, I am not going to pay for this or that" for whatever reason, but mostly they say no due to those imaginary lines.

Now, if this situation was actually haggling over the price of a car I wanted to buy I still would not like it, but there does not seem anything inherently wrong about the practice. HOWEVER, if you are dealing with an operation or with any care that a person gets or does not get, if their health is on the line and the reason a health insurance company says no, we won't pay is those imaginary lines, this is wrong. A company basically says we won't make money off you if you have this operation, or if you have a pre-existing condition and we know we'll lose money on you. Money becomes more important than the person.

Take this to the next level where BILLIONS of dollars are spent by these companies to influence or pay-off those people who can balance out this unfairness, just so these companies can continue to make money, and I think this borders on human rights violations.

Even if these were not acts of pure greed and human rights violations, the core agreement of health insurance has been severely broken. A person or family must pay a significant portion of their income - tens of thousands of dollars, likely for years, to a company who has lost the focus of saving that money for the day when you, or others around you, may need it.

The over-arching, basic idea of health insurance is that we all put money into a pot for the eventuality of having to pay money for health care. This is not just a fine idea, it is a very, very commendable one. And if a health insurance company wants to try to make a living off of it, I think this is also a good idea. This is the idea of a free market health insurance industry. But this is not the America we live in, is it?

The sad fact is that health insurance companies refuse to regulate themselves. Maybe it is the whole market that is unable to regulate itself.

I doubt that anyone in America on the second to last day of February, 2010 actually thinks that the market will right itself and nothing should be done.

That leaves us with a quandary: do we fix it with more laws to make the industry lower its prices or do we make more laws to enable and encourage competition in the industry? The first solution is an oversimplified view of the Democrat's solution and the second is an equally oversimplified view of the Repulican's solution. I would encourage both sides to keep in mind the industry is pouring BILLIONS into stopping any change - do we really think they won't pour BILLIONS into finding new loop holes or BILLIONS into creating new monopolies?

For these reasons and more (see the rest of this blog), I think balance must come from a government sponsored plan that has these two goals: to stimulate and regulate competition without dominating it and to be a safety net for the sick, the poor and the veterans (includes Medicare and VA).

I think 8% Health Care is the answer. It is a positive answer. 8% does not say to the free market health industry, "you can't do this, you can't do that." This is not plan that is full of laws. It is a plan that says, "if you can beat the 8% plan either in service or in cost, or both, you are free to do so. But for 8% of a person/family's income, capping out at $6k, the government will make sure that person/family receives all basic health care through all your regular doctors, hospitals and other health care providers." See the other blog entries for more.

This is where health care reform needs to start. From 8% all other reforms can be set to that goal.

Can health insurance companies compete with 8%? They will or they will fail, it's easy as that. But the purpose of reform is to reform the moral inequities discussed above, not to make sure health insurance companies will still have BILLIONS left over to attack the reform.