Here’s hoping for ‘proactive’ health care reform

I hate MBA-speak. Talk of “growing” a company, for example, makes me gag. What was wrong with “building a business?”

But that lexicon boasts one excellent word, proactive or “acting in advance to deal with an expected difficulty; anticipatory.”

I want to be proactive here about the ongoing health care reform fight, to preview the debate and press coverage thereof.

It’s Round One. The fighters are prancing around the ring, measuring each other, feinting; thus, the health care industry’s new pledge of two trillion dollars in cost reductions over 10 years.

You may take that seriously. Living as I do not far from a pottery store whose going-out-of-business sale is two years old and going strong, I don’t. But that’s me.

Reportedly, insurers also have told the White House they will start selling to Americans with pre-existing conditions. This is credible as a product of self-preservation; surveys show a majority of Americans willing to pay for single-payer insurance or Medicare-for-all.

If true, how sweet it is — health insurance industry statesmen confessing they blackball sick people.

What the White House means by reform is murky but seems (“seems” because it’s only Round One) to exclude government insurance for all. Like the Richardson regime in New Mexico, the Obama administration hears the insurance industry loud and clear, but arguments for single-payer, faintly.

Why would the administration throw in the towel now on the only approach combining fairness and huge savings? Well, way back on October 29, 2007, the New York Times reported:

In a reversal from past election cycles, Democratic candidates for president are outpacing Republicans in donations from the health care industry.

Cynical? Maybe. And it‘s true the administration has considered offering Americans the option of a public plan alongside the privates. But it may be just a bargaining chip.

Instructively, a New York Times editorial on May 11 backed a public option only if it wouldn’t drive private insurers out of business.

So much for preliminary sparring; what can we expect in the middle rounds?

First, punchy arguments for market medicine. Like Charles Krauthammer’s “highly competitive, privatized health insurance system with a government-subsidized transition to portability, breaking the absurd and ruinous link between health insurance and employment.”

Note, please, what he doesn’t say — since the first aim of any business is profit, corporate medicine must put your health and mine second.

Krauthammer does pose a fundamental question: “But if you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state,” he writes, “then a single-payer system is the next best alternative.”

Journalism alert! You will read reams of mainstream reporting that assumes health care is a commodity.

Krauthammer’s caveat on single-payer (“Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.”) should also tickle your antennae. That specter, that instruction to be afraid, will be widely retailed.

As if we don’t ration health care today! As if money doesn’t buy better health care today!

Brace yourself, too, for chilling warnings about government getting between you and your doctor. What better distraction from the armies of administrators, accountants and lawyers standing today, in full armor, between you and your doctor.

Recent projections that Medicare and Social Security are going broke sooner also will permit the health care industry and its allies to ask, ever-so-reasonably, if now’s the time to spend more on health. So they will.

Do not expect this in your daily newspaper or on the network news: “The question is why Americans must suffer the world’s most expensive health system and its poor results? What’s preventing an equitable, efficient model?”

That would be proactive.