Those AARP Commercials

Those AARP Commercials

I'm not sure if you have seen them, but AARP is running some very well done ads that show an ambulance moving through heavy city traffic, while a couple of sedans and an SUV try to prevent the ambulance from getting through. All the while, the commercial tells us that there are special interests trying to prevent health care reform.

We all know that the AARP is just a public spirited bunch of old people, concerned about health care, right? It turns out that AARP has a rather peculiar relationship with a major health insurer, United HealthCare. (My insurer, by the way, and I would say that they are a competent and responsible operation in how they handle my coverage.) This article from 2001 mentions that AARP receives tens of millions of dollars a year from United HealthCare—and explains that AARP was attempting to block Blue Cross of Wisconsin's efforts to change from a nonprofit to a stockholder owned health insurer. Conflict of interest?

The louder that Nancy Pelosi screeches how about health insurance companies are "villains" in this debate (as discussed in this July 30, 2009 Roll Call article), the more inclined I am to wonder if some of them have worked out some corrupt deal with the Democrats, like the deal apparently worked out with Big Pharma. Calling insurance companies the villains isn't terribly accurate—but when we see these charges, we should look carefully at what is happening behind the scenes.

Many years ago, I worked for a company whose telephone switches suffered a rather spectacular failure, taking down phone service in several major cities for several hours. It made headlines. What was wrong with the switches was only part of the problem; several of the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) had some problems as well that this problem in our switches revealed. When Congressional committees investigated, my employer took on the chin, taking full responsibility for the problem.

Why did we not expose that we were not alone in causing these service outages? The rumor that spread rapidly through the company was that shortly after taking the blame, RBOCs started ordering more equipment from us. Why? We had deflected blame from them—and they rewarded us for doing so. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar is going on with this blame game.

I agree with AARP: we should not let fearmongering or false claims prevent real reform. But I know that any “reform” that requires 1000 pages to articulate is so full of corrupt deals that we are better off throwing it out, and starting over. Let’s fix the very real problems with our current health system as a series of individual proposals, each of them small enough to boil down to 30-40 pages, and vote up or down on each of them, one at a time. If Congress is so beholden to special interest groups that it needs to fold everything into a single incomprehensible bill to make anything happen, we’ve got something a lot worse wrong in this country than just health care.

Let’s start out by looking at what really needs fixing:

1. The core issue is Americans who are not insured. By some estimates, that’s about 46 million people. About 8-9 million of those are illegal aliens. If Congress were not so incredibly corrupted by identity politics and business interests, they would be working to fix that part of the puzzle first. Close the border. Require all employers to use E-verify; enforce existing laws for all knowing employment of illegal aliens. Employers having to raise wages to deal with the smaller labor pool would increase wages for unskilled and low skilled legal workers—enough that some might actually be able to afford insurance.

2. Everyone in the pool! At least, everyone in some pool. I don’t like the idea of government telling everyone that they have to have insurance, but because the government already requires hospitals to provide emergency room care, we have effectively created a highly inefficient socialized health care system—one that fails to treat many patients until their problems have gone from minor to major. On your Form 1040, if you have an income above say, $18,000 a year per family member, and you don’t have health insurance, we add a $1000 per family member fine—because if you aren’t insured, the odds are excellent that the rest of us are going to get stuck with either your unpaid medical bills, or your bankruptcy.

3. Most of the uninsured aren’t that well off. Let’s face reality: we are already paying for medical care for the uninsured—in an incredibly clumsy and inefficient way (at the emergency room). It makes more sense to create a super pool: all government employees (including Congress and the President); all Medicaid and Medicare recipients; and everyone who can’t afford to buy their own health insurance. Insurance pools work because they include a wide range of ages, health statuses, and occupations. This super pool would have a remarkably normal distribution, from little kids all the way through the elderly.

4. Give everyone a refundable tax credit equal to the cost of the super pool’s unsubsidized premiums to pay for health insurance, and then tax as ordinary income all employer or union provided health insurance premiums above that level.

It’s a proposal. But each part is clear, something that everyone can understand, and it is hard to hide anything corrupt in the 30-40 page bills required to implement each of these parts.

UPDATE: John Lott says that health insurance companies are about to pour a pile of money into getting Obamacare passed. This whole dance about the public option was probably just a little piece of kabuki to make the average leftist think that Obama isn't a tool of corporate interests.