High costs of uninsured

I had to hack through the rhetoric laden post by Ross Kaminsky the other day about health care-all that stuff about how people love free steak lunches but don't like spam sandwiches--but when I did it seemed that he had four major points. None of them hold up very well.

1. Kaminsky thinks people are cheap. Nobody wants to pay to cover our nation's 47 million uninsured, he says. Let's assume he is right and nobody wants to pay for anything. Then think of all the high costs we all pay because people lack insurance. Because they lack access to preventive care, people who are uninsured often are sicker before they seek care. Hospitals provide some $34 billion worth of uncompensated care a year. Who does picks up that bill eventually? The rest of us.

2. Kaminsky believes that it's because people are cheap that efforts to reform the health care system have failed. However, he neglects to mention the powerful health care lobby, which has contributed more than $721 million to federal politicians and parties since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It seems to me that the big insurance, pharmaceutical, and other health care interests have had more to do with health care reform not getting very far than does people's inner stinginess.

3. Kaminsky thinks our health care system works just great compared to countries with national health care plans, such as Canada and Britain, and he cites our superior cancer survival rates. But we do worse than both these countries when it comes to infant mortality. Furthermore, it's estimated that in 2006 alone, some 22,000 Americans died prematurely as a consequence of being uninsured. The cost of lost productivity from people who suffer from diminished health or live shorter lives costs about between $102 billion and $204 billion a year.

4. Kaminsky thinks that if we let the market work, our problems will be solved. He wants to be able to buy his health insurance across state lines, and so forth. But this assumes people have the money to buy insurance coverage. One policy pushed by conservatives are Health Savings Accounts, in which people pay for most of their health care expenses themselves until they reach a plan's high deductible. However, a recent study shows that most uninsured households just don't have the cash to cover these deductibles.

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