I watched a panel discussion about the healthcare law being contemplated by the current majority in congress and the law it is intended to replace on Fox this Sunday. One of the only two or three intellectually honest personalities on Fox, Chris Wallace, was the moderator, and the panel comprised guests of varying levels of authority on the subject from a medical doctor, Ezekiel Emanuel, who helped conceive the Affordable Care Act, to Rachel Compos-Duffy, a chronic reality game-show contestant and failed would-be host on network television, now a conservative shill on the staff at Fox. Then, there were Karl Rove--I need not say more about him--and Neera Tanden, two political operatives for the conservative and liberal movements respectively. The discussion, like all of those that purport to include both sides of a political issue these days, rapidly broke down into condescension, dismissive facial expressions and in the case of Compos-Duffy, scornful laughter, which conservatives use when they don't have an answer to the opponents point. They were all educated, except for Rove who has no degree, but rather is a student of the Sigretti school of political campaigning, although their educations seemed availing of cogent argument less often than might be expected. Except for Compos-Duffy, they were focused on the issues rather than on prevailing, and while one might not agree with any one or other of them, they all made points that, as opinions, merited attention.
While the colloquy did not lead to any kind of resolution, it did raise a question. When the issue of containing healthcare costs arose, Compos-Duffy, laughing in condescension at Dr. Emanuel as he talked about the CBO critique of "Trumpcare," digressed to opine that one of the ways of reducing such costs was tort-reform, implying that the liberal camp was ignoring it and shouldn't because it is pivotal. It isn't. Her comments were significant not because they had merit in light of the fact that the total of medical malpractice civil court awards in such cases is less than $5 billion per year while the cost of healthcare in the United States exceeds 15% of our GDP, or $2.5 trillion plus. Thus, eliminating tort cases against those who commit malpractice entirely would yield a decrease in the cost of medical care of .2% or less. That's not 2%, it's .002 of the total...2 1,000ths of the total; it's .2%...a number so negligible as to be meaningless. And if you consider that medical malpractice liability is the only deterrent other than morality to careless medical practice, and that in spite of liability exposure almost 250,000 Americans die in consequence of just hospital negligence every year, eliminating that deterrent, minimal as it is, would likely open floodgates of bad results emanating from our healthcare system. No, the problem with the cost of healthcare in this country isn't that doctors get sued too often. The problem is that the free market, on which conservatives seek to rely...again...has not worked to keep costs down for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to Republican submission to the will of pharmaceutical companies when Medicare Part D was propounded and negotiating with those companies was banned by law. The problem is that medicine is in private hands and we pay half again what the next most expensive country, Germany, pays for healthcare, and that is because all of the top 30 industrialized nations have some form of public healthcare funding from the "Obamacare" model of subsidized funding of the insurance market to outright socialized medicine.
So now comes the Republican majority in congress promulgating a bill that is contrary to the experience of at least the 29 other most advanced nations on earth by reverting from a hybrid of the systems that those other countries use to what we gave up to get that hybrid: the free market, which led to nearly 50 million Americans being uninsured and without access to healthcare. Why that caused Compos-Duffy to issue a haughty laugh I cannot say, but she certainly is a Republican, and a conservative one in the bargain.
You've no doubt tired of seeing these words on this blog, but I can't see my way around them: on election day, the majority of the American people get what they deserve. I would add in the matter of healthcare though, and in the matters of most social issues for that matter, that unfortunately, the minority gets it too. So next time you vote Republican, think with your own head, not someone else's, and vote in a way that you can live with. You just might get what you vote for.
Your friend,
Mike
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