The New Atheist

I haven’t been blogging for a while, mostly because Twitter has been such a great place to share quick thoughts, but there are a few things on the health care debate I wanted to share in more than 140 characters. The Twitter items also post here, and I will turn that off if anyone asks.

Anyway, the health care issue has been rather significant lately, and this new group of folks who call themselves “teabaggers” because they apparently don’t appreciate the origin of the term, as I’m sure they wouldn’t approve of such a practice.

So, on to the real content.

Check out the below video of Al Franken conversing with his constituents at the MN State Fair (HT Cynical-C)

Around the 3:00 minute mark, Franken makes an interesting comment about how health care is current paid for, and expands on the idea for a good part of the rest of the exchange. In short, health care is already paid for by the tax payers, through emergency room prices, insurance premiums and Medicare/Medicaid. What Franken proposes is essentially a reallocation of funds through legislation and regulation.

I am generally not a fan of more government oversight and regulation, it tends to be wasteful and inefficient. But in this case, Franken seems to have a good point – if we change how we’re paying for these costs, and pay for lower costs items such as preventative care, rather than emergency care, we can get more done with the same amount of money or less (economists call this Pareto efficiency). At the same time we can address what amounts to fraud in the Medicare system today, which is costing the government (and therefore tax payers, don’t forget) quite a lot of money, and is due mostly to poorly aligned incentives (in my opinion).

The video is worth a careful watch, and Fraken shows himself as a thoughtful person, I think if more politicians were willing to engage in such a honest communication, we could have a better opinion of politicians. Personally, I believe the health care debate is being horribly over simplified by both sides of the media; the issues, costs and benefits are being obscured.

I do not have an answer on how to fix health care, and as much as I dislike the “nanny state” the US seems to have become, it seems despicable that we would find it acceptable to spend more taxpayer funds, while allowing people to suffer by denying preventative care in deference to costly (and often painful) emergency room care. It seems the conservatives value human life so much they are happy to spend money to save it from almost dying, but not spend money to prevent it from almost dying. This is, of course, unless it is a life convicted of a crime, in which case it is perfectly rational to put an end to that life they felt so sacred when it was a fetus.

So let’s think about it, what would be rational for health care? Again, I don’t have any answers, but a few thoughts:

• Focus on the costs of results – if $25 in cost can prevent $100 in care later 50% of the time, it is probably a good investment. Private insurance has proved this out with things like Lasik surgery, smoking cessation and weight loss
• The government is lousy at evaluating risk – there are too many interests involved, again pointing toward a stronger role for markets rather than legislation
• Government can create a regulatory atmosphere which provides incentives to health care providers and patients to minimize the costs of services (i.e. avoiding needless procedures suggested by doctors, avoiding needless visits by patients).

Again, I am by no means an expert in this space, but I think Franken brings up some pretty good points, and admits it is not an easy problem to solve, which is respectable, it isn’t.

What do you think?

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