Losing 23% of health dollar

Dear Editor:

When I was a child in the 1950s, it was common for many people to toss cigarette butts and crumpled cigarette packages, empty matchbooks and just about everything else onto the ground. Back then litter was a commonly held concept or blind spot, so we did not “see” it. Modern society is at a higher level of consciousness regarding litter.

Today we cannot see the commonly held concept of “Insurance” for what it is, a blind spot, particularly as it interfaces with another commonly held fuzzy concept: “Health care.”

The insurance industry works on some margin of profit — let’s call it 23%, which I think is close. This
would be 23-cents of every health care dollar that goes a middleman-type industry not involved in directly delivering health care.

The insurance industry produces no product or valu except the administration of its own business: largely paperwork, data collection and sales. So the product of the insurance industry is administrating its own business, collecting premiums, paying liabilities, producing a lot of data while retaining its margin of profit, which comes out of health care dollars. This does nothing to improve our health.

By medical analogy, an organism that functions this way is referred to as a parasite, which lives by extracting nutrients from and poisoning the host, producing poverty in some cases and death in others. This makes the host, our system, very sick. Paying insurance premiums is not a path to wellness.

The notion of prevention is anathema to the industry because when an adverse event is prevented, no business is conducted (no sale!). Better to pay for the adverse outcome because this is doing business, and increased premiums will maintain the 23% profit. More liability = more business = increased premiums = 23% of more revenue.

This is a major portion of spiraling health care costs
and the debt consuming our future.

Whatever you may think about your personal experiences with the system or whether your notion of
“Health” is even pertinent to the current debate, you can see that the recovery of this missing 23% of the dollar would go a long way to solving the dilemma that we
call health care.

In my view, health care should be delivered by a single provider (nationalize health care?) and administered by a single payer: a much smaller U.S. government.

Robert Dixon, DC
Berkeley Springs