Time Running Out for Medicare Fix

Sounds like Medicare is in big trouble financially. With health care inflation far outstripping general inflation, and the reluctance of Congress to limit fees, Medicare, like Social Security will be broke when I retire in five years.

The caveat though in this matter is that if indeed Congress does limit fees for physicians and other health care providers under Medicare, there may be a cost shift to the private insurance market, with higher health insurance costs for individuals and companies throughout the USA. This is exactly what is happening now with regard to Medicaid, and uninsured individuals seeking health care services.

And until mandatory health insurance kicks in at 2014 (under the Health Care Reform act), due to these higher health insurance costs more employers will drop health insurance for their employees, and then these employees become uninsured, which then adds to the problem. But if the Health Care reform act does not get amended, then health insurance is mandated for most individuals in the USA in 2014. Then in 2014 health insurance costs may get reduced, as there will be a larger pool of insured who will be paying health insurance premiums.

But that is not the real problem. The real problem is that the USA pays one of the largest percentages of per capita income in health care costs of most any developed country in the world. The percentage that I remember is about 17 percent in the USA, whereas the developed world average is about 10 percent. And the quality of health care which we receive in the USA is not the highest in the world.

Look at countries like France where there is universal health care paid for by the Government (through tax revenues of course), has a better health care system in terms of quality, and keeps its per capita average at about 10 percent.

I feel that there are a lot of reasons for the very high health care costs in the USA. They include very high malpractice insurance premiums which have to be paid for by both good and bad doctors due to the high amount of medical care litigation, the overuse of specialists by patients, hospitals and doctors having to care for the uninsured, a scarcity of doctors in many areas of the country (low supply and high demand raises prices for services), the lack of interest in training and recruiting doctors as well as the lack of incentive for people to become doctors due to the very high cost of training and starting a practice and others.

Personally, I feel that private enterprise is ill equipped to fix the problem. Only government is in a position to correct the problem. One thing that can be considered is for the Federal Government to provide full ride scholarships to Medical School to future doctors in exchange for providing medical care to seniors under the Medicare program for a lower fixed fee. Futhermore, if these doctors provide care to seniors under Medicare, they should have malpractice claims caps.

Just some thoughts.

Henry G. Huestis of WA 3:10PM May 21, 2011