By Robert S. Siegel
I have a lot of concerns about increased government involvement in health care. I just can not get past my fear that the same mindset that gave us Social Security and the IRS are going to have a say in my family’s health care. I envision a high cost bureaucratic nightmare.
So I wrote a great article proposing a plan that prevents deadbeats in our current healthcare system from buying fancy electronic toys like plasma TVs and video games if they’ve incurred healthcare costs that taxpayers have to pay because they were uninsured. I thought that this was a problem with the health care system today from all of the things that I have read and heard. I thought my plan, if even take half seriously, would cut costs by scaring people into better allocate their spending and their time.
Then I ran into a problem.
I found plenty of anecdotal evidence of what I call the brother-in law problem. It seems everybody out there has a brother-in law that owns a big screen TV or some other gadget but does not have health insurance. However, I can not find an actual study that correlates lack of health insurance and high consumer spending. I want hard data showing people are making bad decisions on healthcare in favor of consumerism.
I can’t find it. It is all anecdotal which is worthless. In fact, anecdotal information can actually be dangerous without hard facts to back it up.
If you have data I am ready to write about it so please send it to me. I want to understand the health care issue better.
What I did learn is that it is nearly impossible to find any data on healthcare that was not gathered to make a specific political point, interpreted to make a political point, or just plain incomplete. I am almost certain that the British healthcare system is terrible for people with any type of complicated illness or beyond the age of guaranteed survival. The waiting list for treatment in Canada sounds frighteningly long.
Folks, the stories of the British and Canadian healthcare bureaucracies seem really scary. We have to avoid the problems here in the U.S. and we’re not going to avoid any problem without an honest discussion. The internet is full of the brother-in law problem and data created just to prove a point not find an answer. That is a distraction that discredits all positions in healthcare.
We are all consumers of healthcare. We should all be consumers of data on the healthcare debate and demand straight forward information. A well informed electorate strengthens the Constitution. In this case, a well informed electorate will save lives.
{ 3 comments }
Bob, you’re on to something. I too just have anecdotal information but it’s just anecdotal and not scientific. Living in pre-Katrina New Orleans I saw people driving up to grocery stores in fancy sports cars that you or I wouldn’t spend the money on and using food stamps to buy their steaks. My story is just anecdotal, though. Not scientific or quantifiable.
Your efforts would be better spent trying to quantify greed and fraud, rather than quantify life style. Maybe you should design and conduct a scientific study trying to find the correlation between greed and fraud, on the one hand, and the receipt of benefits of big government entitlements, on the other hand. In other words, are recipients of government funds more likely to commit fraud against the government than the population at large is likely to commit fraud in business?
…and on the other hand, I’ve heard it said that catastrophic illness is one of the main underlying factors in bankruptcy (of working people presumably without health insurance). Is there evidence of that?
Your point is well taken. Our healthcare is too important to be the political football it is right now.
I’ll dig up the info, but a while back, I read that in France, 80% still buy private insurance, even though it’s supposed to be one of the ‘models’ of socialized medicine we keep hearing about.