21st Century Health Care in America: Paying More, Getting Less?

With the ongoing challenges which are now being raised in many states throughout the nation regarding the recent passage of the Obama Administration's Health Care Reform Act, this boomer has watched the progression in health care delivery from the 1960's to today, and can truthfully say that while costs have exploded in those four decades, the degree of care for the American public overall has seen better days.

In order to reduce costs for many of the public and private health care clinics and hospitals, more and more Americans are not receiving the care they deserve, but what will reduce the bottom lines for the nationalized corporatized health care system that is predominant across the nation after Nixon's HMO legislation passed in the 60's. Many even public clinics and hospitals are now "owned" through various contracts by "private" corporate entities as they have become privatized, even after their initial building costs and research grants were funded by the American public.

Upon even emergency room visits, more and more patients are being seen initially by not medical doctors or those with advanced diagnostic degrees, but by physician's assistants or other support staff but at costs that far exceed those fees and charges in the past for trained physicians and without the expertise to accurately diagnose complex medical conditions.

Throughout many states, there are even signs posted at many of these emergency clinics and hospitals advising that they are not accepting new Medicare patients. Thus, the future for the boomers and their offspring at this point in America's history has not even begun to be addressed by those in Washington or at the state levels in just why health care costs have risen so out of proportion to the cost of living even though the entire HMO concept and "free market" privatized clinics were sold to the public in order to reduce costs and provide better care when that legislation was proposed back in the 60's.

Instead, it has resulted in numerous trips to several different doctors or providers in order to get accurate diagnosis, or physicians more geared toward treating the symptoms rather than the disease and using medications which many times create even more problems or different health issues in concert due to drug interactions and complications.

Changes are needed, but not the changes that Washington appears to be focused on in merely consulting the "stakeholders" in corporatized medicine. But the American public that is paying a larger share than ever before for their health care costs, both nonemergency and emergency.

How much of the health care dollars now provided by the taxpayers and insurers are now being earmarked for all those ads on television mostly directed toward choosing a hospital for maternity and childbirth needs? Or elective procedures?

Or advertising their facilities and services for non-English speaking patients for all those federal and state grant monies in providing care for non-citizens at the general public's ultimate expense? Or the increased costs in those ten to twenty page bills passed on to the public for those highly paid lobbyists at the state capitols and Washington?

It appears to this boomer in the end, the Health Care Reform Act is more similar to the mandatory auto insurance laws throughout the nation, with the same mindset and ultimate costs in increased taxation for all in passing on governmental functions, such as the settlement of property claims, or life and death issues to the financial sector, banks and insurers who will be more concerned with THEIR bottom lines and business needs, rather than quality of care.

I mean, unlike mandatory auto insurance, an unpaid or disallowed claim has a greater likelihood and much higher percentage of eventually ending in death or bankruptcy rather than a fender bender so the analogy used in order to include that "mandatory" provision left much out in regulating both those costs, and the provision and most likely will also then, as with the insurance laws, end up again costing the taxpaying public more in providing all the courts that will be needed in order to address those "breach of contract" or "wrongful death" actions.

Progress in this area, as with it appears so many others in the new millineum to many Americans, just may come at a much greater cost than even in those Nixon years.

And it appears to this boomer that the great Health Care Reform Act just may become the precursor to the Great Health Care AND Bank bailout of 2025 or sooner, when this patient dies.