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Monday, July 27, 2009

National health-care plan is a must

GUEST OPINION

By Dr. Raymond F. Graap
SPECIAL TO THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.27.2009

Many comments have been made about the waste and inefficiency of our present "system" of health-care funding, but most people do not understand how that comes about. A real-time, real- life explanation may help.





In our five-physician office, we deal with 70 insurance plans, from the largest to the smallest. These plans subdivide into 334 different arrangements with Tucson community employers. Each arrangement has a different set of benefits: deductibles, co-pays, and limits of coverage all differ based on what the employer has negotiated with the plan.

Employers find this a more expensive, frustrating and difficult problem with every passing year.
Besides the average 15 percent plan overhead for processing, marketing and profit, providers need to hire extra personnel or a professional billing service to process each and every service, amounting to another 7-to-10 percent cost.

If one looks at the entire cost issue, including hospitals, extended care facilities, rehabilitation centers, et cetera, the best data from Physicians for a National Health Plan shows a 31 percent overall cost just to administer this mess.

In some hospitals, the business office has as many clerks as there are nurses and patient-care personnel. If one spends $10,000 per year for family coverage, $3,000 per year goes just to run the "system."

This is the major reason why the current multi-payer system (1,200 plans at last count) is so wasteful and dysfunctional, and why it costs U.S. citizens $8,000 per person per year. This is twice as much as in any other industrialized country; yet, we don't cover nearly 50 million citizens and only partially cover another 50 million.

We are all paying for this, whether in direct payments or our premiums or our taxes; we just pay far too much for what we get. Other industrialized countries had bad systems that needed fixing and they fixed them — all except for the U.S. Their systems are not problem-free but they do provide all their citizens' basic health-care needs, and no one goes bankrupt because of health-care costs.

Many people are insulated from this reality and think that their health-care plan serves them well — until they need it, and then a blunt unpleasant experience ensues for too many.
Expanding Medicare for all as proposed in HR 676, which has 85 Congressional co-sponsors, would provide comprehensive universal coverage for all our citizens: everyone in, not one left out, with VA, military and other established programs continuing as is.

Even with its problems, Medicare has an operational overhead of only 3 percent, and the problems are fixable. This approach is the most conservative, fiscally responsible way to fund health care without creating another whole bureaucracy.

It would not cost any additional funds; in fact, estimates from the Government Accountability Office, are that it would save $225 billion every year. Every politician knows this. However, they are tying themselves into knots trying to placate the commercial insurance industry.

It is far past time for our elected officials to step up to the plate and do the right thing for the American people.

E-mail Dr. Raymond F. Graap at rfgraap@comcast.net