Randy Alcorn: Health-Care Reform Lost in the Jungle

http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/022810_randy_alcorn/

By Randy Alcorn

Status quo will carry on until more Americans realize they're at risk of becoming carrion

After more than a year of public debate, political maneuvering and daily media attention, the issue of health care in America remains unresolved. As the entire, frustrating, process drags on, it reveals not only how difficult it is to find a solution to providing health-care coverage for every American but it also exposes with glaring clarity the realties of who and what we are as a society. Those realities explain the difficulty in finding a solution.

The single overriding reality is that America is an economic jungle in which survival depends on money. Money is ultimately what all the fuss and focus is about, because having enough of it enables the jungle dwellers to protect themselves from the inherent dangers of jungle living. The more money one has, the greater the protection, as well as the comfort and opportunity.

The second reality is that jungle dwellers organize into tribes for the mutual benefits that derive from strength in numbers. Corporations are tribes, as are labor unions, political parties, government bureaucracies and professional associations. Individual jungle dwellers can be members of multiple tribes and even switch allegiances. The primary objective of tribe membership is to facilitate acquisition of money. No tribe in America can survive long without it.

The third reality is that virtually everyone, sometimes grudgingly, accepts the need for an overruling authority that prevents the wholesale destruction of the jungle by the selfish pursuit of money among individuals and tribes. The economic jungle cannot become so savagely unbalanced as to imperil the ecology that sustains it. Government is the authority established to regulate the jungle.

This third reality is where we find the fulcrum upon which the issue of health-care reform teeters. How much government regulation is necessary? How much economic savagery should we tolerate? And, which is the greater threat to the ecology of the economic jungle?

America spent $2.5 trillion on health care last year. At the current rate of increase, annual expenditures on health care will be $4.5 trillion by 2020. The tribes enriching themselves on this bounty want the least government intervention. They argue that the free market will provide the most health care for the most people. But, as the cost of health care relentlessly soars and more people are unable to afford it, all these tribes can do is blame each other for the rising costs.

Hospitals and doctors demand annual price hikes of 40 percent or more to cover losses they blame on fewer patients having adequate or any health insurance. Pharmaceutical companies blame development and research costs for their high prices, but, nevertheless, eke out 20 percent profits. Insurance companies blame all of them for increased premiums, but insurance companies make huge profits by selectively selling policies, denying as many claims as they can get away with, and charging ever-higher premiums.

Surely, the supply-and-demand mechanism of the free market will harness this merry-go-round of greed and provide health-care coverage for everyone, right? We just need to liberate this market from regulation, like we did with the financial market.

WellPoint, the corporate owner of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which recently announced 39 percent premium increases in California, posted record profits of $4.5 billion last year — even after paying million-dollar bonuses to its executives, spending $7.8 million lobbying lawmakers, and splurging $27 million on executive retreats.

Appearing recently before a congressional panel, WellPoint’s $9.5 million-per-year CEO, Angela Braly, apparently saw no ethical incongruity about colossal rate hikes in spite of her company’s huge profits, big bonuses and her own lavish compensation.

Nor should she. Under the laws of the economic jungle such callously gluttonous behavior is not only justified, it is expected. Better to kill and gorge than be killed and gorged upon. There is little regard required for the general welfare or for effects on the future. The goal is to gather in as much money as quickly as possible.

For now, most Americans have health insurance, so when it comes to health-care reform they are behaving like herd animals. As long as the grass is green in their corner of the jungle and they are healthy, they are not so concerned that the predators cut the unfortunate stragglers — the slow, sick and injured — out of the herd. They simply go back to munching on the grass and ignore the jackals and hyenas picking clean the bones of the fallen. That’s just life in the jungle.

Until more Americans grasp that most of them are one lost job, one premium hike, one pre-existing condition, one infectious microbe, or one compound fracture away from straggler status, health-care reform is probably doomed. As the Great Recession drags on, however, and joblessness persists, more Americans will feel the pain for the first time, and then reform may come.

Meanwhile, as the jungle becomes more brutally unbalanced, the hyenas and jackals will have no shortage of carrion.

— Santa Barbara political observer Randy Alcorn can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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