Getting control freaks out of health care before they kill us

Robert Moffit:

People will suffer needlessly and die before their time if lawmakers don’t fix the health care system.

That’s not clownish propaganda from lefty filmmaker Michael Moore, producer and director of the movie “Sicko,” who celebrates, among other things, Fidel Castro’s health care system. It’s the cold, sober warning of Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger in her book, “Who Killed Health Care?”

Herzlinger’s solution to the health care problem isn’t to turn your future health care decisions over to a mandarin class of government-appointed control freaks. For Herzlinger, you are the answer. You need direct control over your health care dollars and the key decisions that affect this very personal dimension of your life. This idea is the polar opposite of the complicated schemes of those on the presidential campaign trail.

Herzlinger’s book could not be more timely. This slim volume is targeted at ordinary Americans and is refreshingly free of academic jargon. Herzlinger explains in plain English what is wrong in American health care and how exactly to fix it.

The key fix is to shift health care decision making from today’s array of institutions to individuals and families. The result would be a new system driven by the familiar forces that power every other part of the American economy — personal choice and direct control over the expenditure of health care dollars.

Few Americans today exercise any significant control over their health care dollars; it is done for them, and to them, by third parties — employers, managed care executives and government officials.

They decide what you buy, how much you pay and what benefits and level of quality you get. Only $3.50 out of every $100 spent on health insurance premiums is under the direct control of individuals.

Because there is little personal control in today’s system, the system is not accountable to individual patients....

Herzlinger cites numerous examples of patients done wrong by the current system’s perverse incentives, and this reviewer could add many more. Many patients, for example, would benefit from easy access to “specialty hospitals” for highly specialized treatment of their conditions, but hospital lobbyists enlist allies in Congress, including champions of national health insurance, to block the growth of these new businesses, because they threaten existing providers’ bottom lines.

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One of the problems with the current system is that other people are spending their money for our health care and therefore have the responsibility to watch how it is spent. This usually results in doing the minimum necessary to fulfill their obligation. Meanwhile since it is other peoples money patients have no incentive to control their use of health care. I think health saving accounts with high deductibles catastrophic insurance is the way to go. We have seen how Canada's control freak "single payer" plan results in rationed health care and long waits for routine treatments. National health care in the UK is even worse.