Health Care - The beat goes on

The remarkably surrealistic health care debate continues.  On offer two recent events.

The first is a TV ad that notes that the house passed bill will dramatically increase health care cost and be bad for individuals and small businesses.  Note, the ad is in part true.  Under any health care bill health care cost will in fact increase.  But some common sense notes:

• If more people have health insurance then more people will receive health care and quite inevitably health care cost will increase.
• No matter what happens, including nothing, health care cost are going to increase.  Prescription prices are expected to jump 9% to 16% this year according to a recent news item.  That's got nothing at all to do with any or no health care bill.  It's already happening.  Likewise heal insurance premiums according to several recent news items and surveys.
  
• The badness or goodness of the bill depends entirely on the current health care position of the individual.  If you've got good health care including insurance then it's unlikely that your cost will change much at all.  If you don't have good health care including insurance then the bill will indeed impose new cost.  But, those cost are much lower than the societal cost of uninsured patients!

This one strikes me as factually true but entirely misleading to the point of being false.  It's a pity that the health care conversation continues to be so profoundly detached from any reality and common sense.

The second is a phone call I got yesterday.  It seems the AARP was conducting a town hall phone conference in Massachusetts with health care reform as the topic.  I listened for some time before becoming convinced that this was yet another nonsensical posturing.  Consider the following:

• While I was on the call the speaker noted that AARP had supported the recent House bill in part because it rescinded a previous provision that would have cut medicare payments to health care providers.  Never mind that the US health care cost per person is much higher than other industrialized countries and that the results are poorer we should continue to overpay for under performance! 
• During the call there were several survey questions.  What troubled me about the questions was that they were NOT intended to elicit any thoughtful insight into health care issues.  Rather they were structured around building support for sound bites.  Consider the one that asked of the following what is your greatest health care concern.  OK, am I concerned by any particular health care condition.  Just now I'm in good health so no I'm not.  But, of course, if I get cancer then cancer treatment will be very important to me.  Likewise Medicare coverage and EVERY other one of the items on the list.  Common sense dictates that such questions don't inform the discourse they simply allow someone to say this percent of older Americans in a recent Massachusetts survey were afraid of this condition.  Interesting in its way but not relevant given that a significant portion of Americans have or will have EVERY ONE of the listed conditions!
  
• The call also had phone in questions.  I don't know what the process was for selecting phone in questions but I did note that the questions during my time on the call were driven exclusively by the sort of sound bites various ads and news stories have raised.  Here I note that I believe that Mr Obama is entirely right when he noted in a recent speech that much of what passes for discourse in this area is incorrect on the facts or worse.

While on one hand I'm glad that the AARP has a position, but if this is the best they can do to promote something remotely related to common sense and reality then I'm not at all hopeful that health care reform will be anything more than yet another example of political failure leading to bad public policy.

A parting common sense thought.,  We continue to talk about health care reform when what the law is really about is health care insurance.  While we continue to focus on insurance there is little hope that we might actually get health care reform that brings our cost and results inline with other first world countries.

Just a common sense POV.