Healthcare is not a right. More on that shortly.

Controlling the population is mandatory for Marxist leftist progressives. Healthcare is a major lever in that control. If you control my access to healthcare, you control me.

If you ever doubted this, the last two years of COVID-mania clearly demonstrate the fact. While most people think people’s main motivators are money and/or power, a new factor became apparent... fear. Scare the people and make them believe that their lives are about to end, and they willingly cede their freedoms to government in return for a promise to be saved from danger. But that promise is one that government cannot deliver on, even if it wanted to.

But it proved to government that it can get that control just by scaring us.

US healthcare spending ($4.1 trillion in 2020) represents almost twenty percent of our GDP and climbing, up from 17.7% in 2017. And government is not just a regulator of it, but a major purchaser, which has price pressure implications. This parallels last Thursday’s article here about the Economic balloon.

Our third-party payor system is a key factor in this inflation. It shields the patient from the true cost of the care received and does not provide incentives to use medical resources efficiently.

The cost of claims processing and other paperwork adds a huge fiscal burden to healthcare without providing any benefit for the money spent on that activity. It contains little usable medical information and is basically a request for payment.

Logically, health insurers have no incentive to keep medical costs down. They are regulated and must pay out at least 80% of the premiums collected in claims (the ‘loss ratio’) and the remaining percentages go towards operational costs. They invest the premiums collected and generate investment income before paying claims. And since premiums are based on costs (prior year claims paid), the larger the premiums they collect, the more investment income they make.

We are currently paying insurers a premium of about 20% plus loss of investment income for the privilege of having insurance.

It is, therefore, imperative that we wrest back control of how healthcare is administered and paid for to avoid moving towards a single-payer system in which we’d all then be controlled by bureaucrats. Imagine a Chinese system where you get citizenship points or demerits that then affect your access to healthcare! Imagine getting your care from the DMV.

The solution? Modify the Medical Savings Account (MSA) legislation to permit pre-tax dollars to be paid in by the employer and employee in lieu of providing healthcare insurance. Permit the patient to control spending these funds for healthcare services or to purchase insurance. Catastrophic (umbrella, major medical) insurance would be required to protect against a medical calamity and would be purchased with some of these funds.

Image: Health insurance by ijeab. Freepik license.

Then, all primary care Part B services would be paid by a debit card transaction at the time of service. In return for full payment, providers would discount their services by the amounts they save in the efficiencies gained from not having to file, track, and collect on claims or pay billing labor, which is a significant amount. There are many details to cover; this is just the overview.

Do you know who pays for your employer-provided health insurance? You do. The total cost of your labor includes salaries, taxes, health coverage, pensions, and benefits. Your health insurance is not “free.” Most people just don’t realize they are paying for it. It is money withheld from your wage that you otherwise would earn.

In 2021, the average annual family plan cost $21,342, with the employer paying approximately $15,000 of that and the employee paying the remainder. Eliminate premiums and you would have that $21,000 per year added to your MSA tax-free.

So back to the opening statement. Healthcare is not a “right” in the same way that food, shelter, or clothing are not rights, even though some try to misleadingly portray it as such. Since it would require one party to give up something of value to another party, healthcare cannot be a “right” as defined in our Bill of Rights.

But...no sane society lets its people go hungry, sleep in the street, go naked, and certainly suffer ill effects from medical issues. While we all have a right to access these things, we don’t have the right to make someone else pay for them.

Changing the paradigm will change some players’ roles. Primary care physicians will be able to streamline their practices. If the need for claims goes away, then the associated costs related to the claims process go away. This includes eligibility verification, treatment authorization, referrals, claims filing, collections, and many others.

If implemented today and combined with tort reform, physicians could reduce their rates from 25 to 50 percent, and would still make the same net income and cash flow. The patient will realize these savings without affecting the physicians and their viability.

Of the $4 trillion spent today, over $1 trillion is lost in paperwork, float, errors, collections, and bad debt. Eliminating the claim for Part B services will nearly erase this waste.

The way we engage with the system must be radically altered. We will be up against firm resistance from all the parties who gain wealth and power from this system, as well as those leftist progressives who do not want this solution as it means the end of their control over us. This may take a movement to accomplish.

Lewis Dovland is a political observer and passionate about America’s future direction. His focus is on the “Big Picture” end goals of the Progressive Marxist movement and is in the process of publishing a book on solutions to our recovery. He can be contacted at Lewis.Dovland@gmail.com.