Health care solution

A Health Care Solution

You don’t need me to tell you that health care is really expensive and it seems to get worse every year. For some of us it feels unaffordable, for others it simply is unaffordable. I’m excited that the country finally seems poised to address the problem, but I fear that the core problem of escalating costs is being ignored.

Much of the focus of fixing health care, it seems, is to cover the millions who aren’t covered at all. That makes sense. But the problem of course doesn’t stop there. While most of us are lucky enough to get employee financed health care benefits, gone are the days when the company paid for everything. Companies are straining in the face of annual double-digit increases in their costs, and increasingly the employees are left with equally dramatic increases in required contributions, higher deductibles, fewer benefits and more restrictions. The bottom line is that everyone is spending more to stay healthy or they are going without altogether. The problem is dramatic and clear.

How come? I’m sure there are lots of reasons, but it seems obvious that each year there are more ways to keep us living longer. With each new discovery, each new drug and each new machine, the cost of growing older goes up. I think it is reasonable to imagine a day when people routinely live to 150 years old--maybe even during our children’s lifetime?

The problem it seems is that we treat health care as black and white. It’s not all or nothing. We need a good, better and best here. We all feel entitled to the best health care to and to be able to live as long as science can keep us alive.

We could fund healthcare for all, while reducing the cost to all of us and without raising taxes, by simply limiting services as people age. Consider a program where basic care after 65 looks much different than today. Instead of medical care that allows you to live forever you get health care designed to make you comfortable. If you have the resources, of course, you can buy supplemental insurance. I’m not suggesting that we leave our seniors to die a cold-hearted death, but I do think the tradeoff is reasonable.

Capitalism at its core means an unequal distribution of resources and that should extend to health care benefits as well. I would love to live to 150, but I'm not willing to pay for all of society to do the same.

Greg Harris

June 16, 2009