Welcome to the Nueterra Healthcare blog. Each week I plan to give Nueterra’s perspective on health care-related issues that are important to patients, providers and our partners. So I hope that you will come back to this space again and again as the national discussion develops.
Obviously, health care reform is the most important issue facing Nueterra and all health care providers in the country. And judging from President Barack Obama’s recent press conference and the subsequent wrangling in Congress, I couldn’t be more disappointed in the direction the debate is heading.
I see another “non-stimulating stimulus” on the horizon. Just as the president’s economic stimulus plan has yet to produce significant benefits, I am afraid health care reform will result in far less improvement and benefit than is being projected. I believe that the president’s health care reform proposal and other policies his administration is promoting, will have actually hurt our economy by increasing taxes and business mandates while reducing incentives for entrepreneurs and small businesses to create jobs.
The health care incentives are perverse. Why in the world would we want to provide government-sponsored insurance with benefits equal to those provided by the private sector to its employees? Good health benefits should be an incentive for finding and keeping a good job, a reward for honest work.
If we go down this path we are going to take the best health care system in the world and transform it into one with little moral compass and slight regard for fellow human beings.
The president speaks of a health care system that is broken, with spiraling costs that will break the backs of small businesses across the nation. Yet, not once has he mentioned one of the fastest growing expenses – frivolous lawsuits against doctors, which require them to practice “defensive medicine.” Let’s fix what’s obviously broken first. The increasing cost of medical malpractice insurance dwarfs the growth in pure health care costs. Yet the president and his supporters have fought tort reform every inch of the way.
All of our institutions and organizations, from small family businesses to large corporations, our schools, churches and not-for-profit organizations, provide a structure for the individual achievements of participants. Ultimately, individuals are responsible for their own growth and well being. The government can’t solve our problems; we have to solve them ourselves.
In fact, private interests have the ability and incentives to solve our health care financing problems, if the government would just get out of the way and let us do it. We do need reform. But if we are to achieve the goal of universal coverage, we need to let the people and market forces drive it.
Let’s put the decision-making power into the hands of consumers, not take it away as the Obama proposal would do.
Next week: Let Innovators Innovate