Politics

The Real Question for Healtchare Reform: What is the cost?

In the wake of President Obama?s speech to Congress last week, Scott Harrington, a Professor of health care management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a thought provoking article in the Wall Street Journal. In it, he takes the President to task for misrepresenting the facts in several of the anecdotes that he used to paint the insurance industry with broad strokes of malfeasance.

Professor Harrington concluded his article with what some of the most thoughtful advice about health care reform yet offered in the media: ?Responsible reform requires careful analysis of the underlying causes of problem in health insurance and informed debate over the benefits and costs of targeted remedies.?

He gets it right on two points in that sentence. First, we cannot have an informed debate without all the facts, and misconstrued, anecdotal stories are not facts. And second, we cannot have responsible reform without a full accounting of the costs and benefits of the proposal. Glossing over the costs or assuring people that ?there remain some significant details to iron out? is simply not good enough.

While no one is suggesting that individuals running insurance companies and making decisions about claims never make mistakes, it is important to look deeper into these ?indictments? than just once or two sentences in a speech. There are reasons and regulations behind why these companies behaved the way in which they did. Exploring the rationale behind their decisions will help us to understand where the existing law needs to be changed, where new laws need to be made, and where existing law regulates too much.

Although I am vehemently opposed his plan, President Obama has highlighted many of the shortcomings that exist in our current system and his proposal merits consideration by my colleagues and I. But, there is no room in this debate for demagoguery or distorting the facts. Such scare tactics detract from the honest debate that you and all Americans deserve.- Mike

Full post as published by Mike Conaway's Blog on September 14, 2009 (boomark / email).