The Healthcare Money Trail
Most workers with health insurance, especially those in politically protected unions, would not give the cost a second thought as they would be charged only some relatively affordable co-pay.
Those on Medicaid and Medicare would typically care even less as they pay nothing or close to it. I know some elders who use Medicare almost recreationally.
Those of our readers who run their own businesses, however, can take no joy in a procedure that costs someone other than the patient a whole lot of money.The reason is simple enough: They are that “someone.” Worse, the smaller the business, the more of a burden healthcare insurance becomes. This I know from experience; Ingram’s remains one of the few small businesses in a world of media conglom-erates, and we pay through the nose.
From our Healthcare Industry Outlook assemblies, we have learned something else: Hospitals and doctors are not the ones profiting from the seemingly excess costs. So much of that money is being scattered along a paper trail from patient to provider that we could cut our costs dramatically if we could retrieve just the half of it.
It is easy to blame managed care companies, but that is not fair. In a system where the recipient of a service is not the one who pays for it, managed care plays a critical role. There is no reason to believe that costs would be lower if these companies did not intervene.
So whom do we blame? No one seems to know.
With a government in Washington that is prepared to nationalize just about any product or service that generates income, we are at a precarious moment in our nation’s history. Healthcare is a tempting target for a takeover because it so unwieldy and so many people are dissatisfied with its delivery.
The problem, of course, is that the government is fully capable of designing a system that will make the current one look like a model of efficiency. This new system would inevitably fail to accommodate the ingrained American sense of oneself as “consumer,”someone who is used to choice, speed and service.
I don’t think we want to build another U.S. Postal Service. Do we?
Consumers will not discover the dysfunction of a new system, of course, until after the new system is in place.
What is needed right now is for some organizationor the industry itself to come forward with an alter-native plan to the one-payer system we will soon see otherwise. As a firststep, that organization should show us where our money goes now. That will give us at least something to talk about.
If we don’t act quickly, pity our poor Canadian friends. They will have nowhere to go for an MRI. And soon thereafter, we may have nowhere to go right along with them. 
Joe Sweeney
Editor-In-Chief & Publisher
Sweeney@IngramsOnLine.com