The South Bend Tribune has an editorial on the subject of providing health care to uninsured or underinsured Hoosiers, particularly children.
Indiana can’t afford for residents who don’t have health insurance to go without medical care. Neither can the state afford for uninsured residents to depend on emergency rooms to receive routine medical care. Most of all, Indiana cannot afford for Hoosier children from low-income families to go without either health insurance coverage or medical care.
They are right. Implicit in that statement is the fact that this isn’t a choice between paying for their healthcare or not paying for it. When someone who can’t afford health care really needs it, they don’t typically do without. Instead they wait until the problem is really bad, then they go to an emergency room, and the public pays for it, one way or another. Often times the emergency room is publicly funded. In addition, health care for those who can pay is more expensive to subsidize service provided to those who cannot pay. The subsidies can even take less obvious forms. For example, Perry County passed an almost certainly illegal Certificate of Need ordinance designed to prevent competition to its County Hospital, allegedly because competition to that hospital would take paying customers away and hurt its ability to serve the uninsured and underinsured.
I think we’d be hard pressed to design a system that was more expensive and less efficient if we tried.
The South Bend Tribune endorses efforts by FSSA, Hoosier Healthwise manged care providers, and school systems to work together to set up professionally staffed in-school clinics. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it makes sense. If you want to make sure kids are getting proper health care, you go to where the kids are: the schools. On the other hand, it seems like yet another function laid on the shoulders of already burdened schools which will be a further distraction from schools actually being able to educate children while they are at school.
I think we’d be hard pressed to design a system that was more expensive and less efficient if we tried.
Oh, I’m sure there is room for unimprovement.
As much as I agree that we pay for healthcare regardless, I think this is a national issue, not just an Indiana one.
Agree with Jason – sadly, it is always easier to break something than it is to improve it.
To understand how we got where we are, you need to start looking from about 1930, for perspective, and pay special attention to developments in both medicine and employee compensation starting during World War II.
That doesn’t, in itself, let you improve the current situation – but if you don’t know how we got here, it is harder to get to a better place.
Much of the health care problem was started when the Federal Government got into the health care business. The government throws piles of money into a broken system and the costs continue to rise.
Mike Sylvester
I agree with Mike in so far as it is the governments responsibility and rather just throw a load of cash at the issue hoping itll sort it out, they need to engage and understand the problems, then delegate the appropriate finances to move forward to a solution.