Imagine going to the supermarket, taking your groceries to the checkout and instead of paying, you are handed a complex form.

It lists all your purchases, with arcane technical descriptions of the compositions and recommended usage of each product.

You then submit copies to your grocery insurer, who scrutinizes it to determine if each item is covered by your policy.

Sound absurd?

But how are the items in your grocery cart any less uniquely personal than your health care requirements?

According to HealthPAConline, an advocate of universal health care, in 2005, 36% of personal health care expenditures were paid by private health insurance. Another 46% by various government agencies. That’s 82% of payments by a third party.

Under it’s “History of insurance” heading. Wikipedia states:“In some sense we can say that insurance appears simultaneously with the appearance of human society…we can see insurance in the form of people helping each other. For example, if a house burns down, the members of the community help build a new one.”

So we see from the beginning, the purpose of insurance is to protect the individual from unpredictable and severe losses, by spreading the cost amoungst the entire aggregate of the insured.

David Goldhill, a media and technology executive who has studied the health care industry extensively points out that “Insurance is probably the most complex, costly and distortional method of financing any activity. That’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected and large costs.”

Writing on the website of the Economic Policy Institute, another advocate of universal health care, Ross Eisenbrey describes their study of health insurance industry employment.

“From August 1997 to August 2007, employment in the health insurance industry grew an astounding, 52%…during the same period, employment among physicians, nurses and others who provide health services or work to support them grew half as fast, 26%.”

What puzzles me is, why is Mr. Eisenbrey astounded?

He cites economist Paul Krugman’s description of the health insurance industry: “…an important part of it’s business model is collecting premiums while denying deserving claims and seeking out reasons to exclude patients from coverage they need. It takes a lot of extra employees to do this socially questionable work…”

But as we know, this is not merely a “business model” adopted by evil profiteers.

It is rather the nature of insurance.

Of course, welfare statists such as Eisenbrey and Krugman, pragmatists to the bone, take the status quo as the given, immutable starting point, ignoring both the fundamental nature of insurance and the history of it’s application to the paying of everyday, run-of-the-mill expenses.

Goldhill asks, “An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?”

Not rhetorically, he answers:

“Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S. there is now one health insurance employee- more than 470,000 in total. In 2006 it cost about $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we payed routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way pay for everything else- by ourselves.”

Of course, welfare statists don’t want to go there; that may be a workable solution, but it entails reducing the centralized power of the insurance industry, and thus, the governmental authorities that regulate them.

Instead, they prefer to demonize the insurance companies and replace them with benevolent, all-powerful government.

Thomas Jefferson said: “If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who will live under tyranny.”

AND

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.”

William L.Anderson, a teacher of economics at Frostberg State University in Maryland notes that Montreal, with a population of three million people has only three MRI devices, while Allegheny County, Maryland, with approximately 80,000 residents also has three MRIs.

Why? In Maryland, an MRI machine is a capital asset, providing an it’s owners and operators an income.

In Montreal, as anything else the medical industry provides the consumer, the MRI examination is “free”. The MRI machine is an expensive liability.

Montreal’s medical industry would be better off if MRIs had never been developed.

Stop for a moment to ponder the implications for the future.

So we see that rather than correct the misapplication of insurance to mundane medical needs, what we are being offered is effectively the consolidation and expansion of the insurance dilemma under a single authoritarian agency.

An agency that of necessity, suffers a liability every time it performs it’s avowed function.

Ah, but with proper oversight, this tendency can be superseded, statists may argue.

But what about the cost of oversight?

Well, we’ve seen that by examining the health insurance industry. Note that the inherent inefficiencies pertain to the insurer’s position as a third party payer.

Christopher J. Conover, an assistant research professor at Duke University says the annual burden of health care services regulation amounts to $169.1 billion.

And as we are keenly aware here in Miami, that oversight, as expensive as it is, doesn’t seem to quite fulfill it’s purpose.

It’s easy enough to stand here and cite anecdotes about our personal experiences, positive or negative as to any country’s health care.

As a teenager, I was in Canada with my mother. She became ill and was treated, free of charge, at a Canadian Hospital.

A strong supporter of expansion of government power, as she observed in her homeland, she was quite pleased.

We may forgive my mother for allowing her personal experience to reinforce her extreme socialist bias.

But my mother was an anonymous private citizen.

Miami Herald writer Myriam Marquez presents a maudlin account of the death of her cousin in Cuba, offering this up as a blanket condemnation of Cuban health care.

But no health care system is perfect. There will always be unfortunate deaths that could have been prevented, if all else being the same, the deceased had lived elsewhere.

The simple citings of single incidents or examples are hardly comprehensive, meaningful endorsements.

Or… condemnations.

An anecdote is useless unless it illustrates a broadly applicable principle.

“Woman, 108, must wait 18 months for hearing aid”

read a headline in the U.K. Guardian in July, 2007.

A spokesman for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf is quoted: “I am afraid this is a common problem. In some parts of the country there are over two year waiting lists, which is shocking.”

Again, a statist is unpleasantly surprised by the inevitable consequences of their policies, remember the astounding of Ross Eisenbrey?

A Reuters story from last May indicates Europeans had better get used to it…

“…the European drug industry’s heavy reliance on government funding for reimbursement of medicines means the worst is yet to come…

Industry leaders…warned…health care…(is)…an all-too-easy target for budgetary cost-containment measures.”

And while the heavy regulation along with the severing of the organic link between the causing of a cost and the bearing of a cost prevents competition from holding prices down, it also serves to export that competitive effect.

Thus the phenomena known as “medical tourism”

The on-line travel industry journal, Hotelmarketing.com reported in 2006 that…

“…Medical tourism in Asia is growing rapidly, far outstripping the 4 to 6 per cent growth in general travel bookings predicted for 2006, with the number of medical tourist visits to many countries swelling by 20 to 30 per cent a year.”

Abacus International President and CEO Don Birch says, “The lure of low-cost, high quality healthcare in Asia is estimated to be attracting more than 1.3 million tourists a year to the key locations…

What we’re seeing now is an increase in the number of service providers in the industry specialising to meet the needs of this market…

The current estimated 1.32 million medical tourists come to Asia from all corners of the world – including US and Europe…

Singapore…makes world headlines for performing complex neurosurgical procedures and delivering cutting-edge medical treatment by the region’s leading health specialists…

The cost of treatments in Singapore, such as a hip replacement, can be less than a third of the price in the United States. In some cases, the cost is less than a tenth of what people would pay in America or Europe.”

There we go, conflating “cost” with “price”.

While the prices may range from one third to one tenth the price in the U.S., is the cost really much different?

Of course, this line of reasoning forces up the question; Compared to what?

A question, we now see, can only be answered rationally and pertinently within the parameters of a level competitive playing field.

Only a truly free market, devoid of regulation and licensure, can provide that.

This is an issue of national significance, however contrived and forced that status may be.

I’ll close with a quote that puts the health care debate in a broader perspective, this from congressman Ron Paul:

“The government, like any household struggling with bills to pay, should prioritize it’s budget. If the administration is really serious about supporting health care without contributing to our skyrocketing deficits, they should fulfill promises to reduce our overseas commitments

and

use some of those savings to take care of Americans at home

instead of killing foreigners abroad.”

CNN headline from October 16, 2009:

U.S. deficit biggest since 1945

Obama administration closes the books on fiscal 2009: Falling revenue plus soaring spending leads to a $1.42 trillion deficit.

—The Bikemessenger