Obama Speech in Chicago to AMA
On June 15th, President Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association in Chicago. Considering that a big part of the President’s agenda involves health care, it can be assumed that he attached a great deal of importance to this speech. Any kind of health care reform would be very difficult to pull off without the support of the biggest and most influential medical advocacy group in the country.
Right off the bat, Mr. Obama offered a real example as to the realities of our health care system when he described the working day of a doctor in New Hampshire:
“Our costly health care system is unsustainable for doctors like Michael Kahn in New Hampshire, who, as he puts it, spends 20 percent of each day supervising a staff explaining insurance problems to patients, completing authorization forms, and writing appeal letters; a routine that he calls disruptive and distracting, giving him less time to do what he became a doctor to do and actually care for his patients.”
He also gave an example as to how things were going among those of us who have to pay for the premiums:
“Small business owners like Chris and Becky Link in Nashville are also struggling. They've always wanted to do right by the workers at their family-run marketing firm, but have recently had to do the unthinkable and lay off a number of employees - layoffs that could have been deferred, they say, if health care costs weren't so high. Across the country, over one third of small businesses have reduced benefits in recent years and one third have dropped their workers' coverage altogether since the early 90's.”
It doesn’t take much to find the flaw in the system for both the doctors and the small business owners. The doctors’ waste precious hours during their working days either trying to get paid by the insurance companies or explaining to their patients why the insurance company won’t pay for services, and the small business owners have to either cut benefits or lay people off because the premiums are so high.
And according to President Obama, it isn’t just the small businesses that are struggling with premium costs:
“A big part of what led General Motors and Chrysler into trouble in recent decades was the huge costs they racked up providing health care for their workers; costs that made them less profitable and less competitive with automakers around the world.”
For all the people who are against government involvement in health care, the constant refrain seems to be “I think health care decisions should be between you and your doctor, and no one else.” The implication there is that if the government gets involved there would be some faceless bureaucracy telling you what treatment you can have, which doctor you can see, and which prescriptions you can have. It is very difficult for us to see how that differs from anyone with your average insurance plan.
If you think the government is a faceless bureaucracy, try getting in touch with your insurance company for anything other than paying your premiums. If you think that you can see whichever doctor you choose, see what happens when you try to go see a doctor who isn’t part of your insurance plan. If you think that you can have whichever pills you want, see what happens when the pills you need aren’t on the approved list of your insurance company.
It seems that many of the folks on the anti-reform side believe that there is something profoundly unpatriotic about the idea of getting sick without going broke. But we believe that there can be no health care reform without insurance reform. Insurance is the only business in America (and possibly the world) where you pay an arm and a leg for services that might be rendered, but only if those services aren’t too costly and inconvenient for the people providing them. Plumbers don’t work like that. Carpenters don’t work like that. In fact, if anyone else worked like that they wouldn’t be in business at all.
If you were a fly on the wall over at one of the more expensive offices on K Street, you would see insurance company lobbyists using every number in their considerable rolodexes, and you would hear these lobbyists urging members of Congress to either kill health care reform completely or to fill it with compromises that either render the reform meaningless or make life easier on the insurance companies. Chief among these compromises is “caps,” which is a set limit on the amount of compensation that victims of medical malpractice can receive. They are probably contending that if only there were a limit on compensation, then health care costs would immediately drop like a stone. This is fiction.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (via the New York Times:)
“The office estimates that caps on damages would ultimately reduce malpractice premiums for medical providers but would have a “relatively small” impact on total health spending, reducing it by less than half a percent.”
As usual, the main concern of the insurance company is profits. And if they can maximize those profits by connecting two completely unrelated things (malpractice premiums and healthcare costs,) why wouldn’t they? These caps have maximized insurance profits in Texas, Nevada, and countless other states. But we can’t help but notice that people in these states are still paying just as much as they used to.
To learn more about malpractice issues, please read our malpractice page, or read about our malpractice lawyer, John Sellinger, or view his malpractice video on Utube, or file a free legal consultation with Greenberg & Bederman.
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