Healthcare Challenge to Candidates

Michael Moore posted a challenge to Presidential candidates on The Huffington Post yesterday. His blog post is here.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of Mr. Moore. But I respect his right to free speech and he does dig into very interesting and serious issues. The accessibility of healthcare in the U.S. is definitely one such issue. I applaud his challenge to Presidential candidates! It's a great idea to ask our elected officials to take such a step.

I've worked in the health insurance industry multiple times in my 25 year career developing and managing software and systems. I've personally interacted with state and federal agencies for Medicare, Medicaid, and child health programs. I've worked on group health plans involving private and public corporations. I've personally seen how health care programs work, how the claims are analyzed and processed, and where some of the money flows. The state of health care accessibility in this country is a massive problem!

The number of layers of politics and bureaucracies involved in even the simplest health plan is amazing. Most people couldn't imagine the layers of companies, agencies, and people between a doctor visit and/or trip to the pharmacy and the final payment an insurance company pays out. In most health plans, by the time a single claim has been paid, there has already been unbelievable amounts of money that has already passed through countless hands. Healthcare in this country is a massive business with incredible amounts of money and concessions involved at all levels.

And in my opinion, the problem is not something that any Presidential candidate can solve with campaign promises and expensive television ads. No matter how sincere and valiant their efforts may be, the system didn't get where it is in 4 years and it can't be corrected in 4 years. Any candidate that promises to be able to solve healthcare in this country is blowing serious smoke up the behinds of naive American voters. The problem is not something that can be easily corrected without tipping a lot of boats. And we're not talking about just rocking a few. Most of them need to be capsized to even approach correcting the problem. And most Presidential candidates can't afford to capsize the boats that are directly or indirectly owned by the funds that got them elected. If you think the healthcare system is a big business. It's a dwarf compared to the political system.

Unfortunately, unless some gigantic wave of decency and sincere humanity hits the elected leaders of this country and all levels of the healthcare system, the system isn't going to change anytime soon. Anything short of that is just the aforementioned smoke screen.

Every single person involved at all levels of healthcare needs to be willing to agree that no matter what the cost, they will work together to provide accessible and affordable healthcare to everyone in this country. And 'cost' in this context should be clearly defined for what it really is. 'cost' is what all those involved in the healthcare industry will have to "give up"; not what it will cost them or the government to manage real healthcare costs. There's already billions of dollars spent every year to run healthcare plans in this country and it keeps going up every year. Covering true cost of healthcare is not the problem. If you remove all the concessions, palm greasing, kick backs, or whatever else you would like to call them, the actual cost of providing healthcare will, in reality and without a doubt, be a lot less then what it costs everyone today.

There is one single word that best describes how the state of healthcare in the U.S. got to where it is today. Greed.

And just to be clear about something here, I don't believe that doctors and medical providers are the root of the problem. Big business around them is. Although I'm sure there are doctors and medical providers out there simply in it for the money, I still like to believe that a majority of our doctors and caregivers do it because they're dedicated to positively affecting lives.

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