brigette-russell1The problem with health care in the United States isn’t that people have to pay for it.  The problem is that people don’t.

Most people are accustomed to paying $60 to fill their gas tanks, or $100 (or a lot more for a large family) to buy groceries, or $40 for movie tickets and popcorn and Cokes.  They write checks for cable TV, cell phone bills and car insurance. They buy clothes, shoes, books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, music downloads and toys for their kids.

Some of them shell out more cash for tattoos, piercings, cigarettes, booze and concert tickets.

And yet I’ve heard people howl in horror at writing that $20 co-pay check for a doctor’s visit. Somehow, people have gotten the idea that medical care ought to be free. Our employers ought to pay for our insurance, and that insurance ought to cover every red cent we spend keeping ourselves healthy. Better yet, the government ought to pay for it. Why not? If public education is a right, why not health care?

According to that logic, everything we need ought to be a right:  food, clothing, housing — anything and everything. Those things are already considered rights to the extent that we have a safety net of welfare services to keep people from actual starvation. But the rest of us, those who earn above a designated amount of money, still have to pay for our own groceries and mortgages.

At present, it’s the same with health care. If we don’t have an employer who insures us, we have to pay for our own insurance, but if we can’t afford it, there is Medicaid. 

There are also hospital emergency rooms, where it is illegal to turn people away if they need treatment. There are uninsured Americans, but there are not sick and injured Americans dying in the street because they cannot get medical care.

Our health care system is a mess, to be sure. But much of that mess is caused by excessive paperwork and red tape because instead of just going to the doctor and paying for a flu shot, we go to the doctor, fill out a form, make a co-payment, have the doctor’s insurance clerk fill out another form and submit it to the insurance company.

And it doesn’t end there. Someone has to review the form and decide how much to pay. Then there is more paperwork to get it paid, while the doctor waits for the insurance company to pay him before billing the patient, who may or may not pay promptly. The patient may call the insurance company and complain that they haven’t paid enough, or call the doctor’s office and take up his insurance clerk’s time complaining that the insurance company should have paid more, and so on and so forth.

How getting the government involved is going to make the system more efficient or effective is beyond me. The most efficient way to handle things would be for people to simply write the doctor a check when they get their flu shots, and that’s the end of it. No forms, no clerks, no insurance rigamarole.

Naturally, people would need insurance for catastrophic medical emergencies, but imagine how much cheaper that insurance would be if it really were only for catastrophes, and not for flu shots and annual check-ups and ear infections and small cuts that need two or three stitches. 

If doctors didn’t need to have a clerk fill out reams of paperwork for every ingrown toenail, they wouldn’t have to charge so much for office visits. And if patients were paying for those office visits themselves, they would pay more attention to the total bill and not just the co-payment.

Our health care system suffers from too much, not too little, red tape. The system if deeply flawed, but the answer isn’t replacing it with the kind of nationalized health care that sends Canadians across the border to pay American doctors cash for treatment they can’t get at home.