If We Could Just Be More Judicious About Our Choice of Words…

I am posting this meaningful message taken from NAHU's B2B Internet discussion group.

As posted 2/7/2009 on NAHU B2B
by Tom Gibson - Senior Market Services - Camas, WA
(he is a NAHU member but not a CAHU member)

You would think that over 20 years of insurance reform and over a thousand state and federal mandates later someone might have realized that trying to cure our health care system through insurance reform wasn't the answer. A big part of why has to do with the very imprecise way most Americans speak. Unlike most other English speaking people we speak in such vague terms, using the same words to mean vastly different things that many people that don't speak English as a native language can't follow what an American is saying at all.

A case in point is the way we use health care and health care provider to mean either a doctor or an insurance company when in fact insurance companies are not health care providers in the strictest sense of the word. If you disagree with that statement then you have just made my point for me. Insurance companies do bundle contracts and providers together and kind of sell those like a product, but this leaves the indelible impression in a majority of people's minds that insurers and their agents are somehow involved in escalating prices and since most agents seem either fairly well to do, better off financially than most people that buy insurance there isn't any evidence to disabuse them of that notion.

It isn't really well understood that insurance has actually been the only brake on really wild runaway spending in lieu of a strong governmental organization that sets prices and standards of care. We have no real price controls or standards of care, just this free market illusion that all doctors should be respected and that the doctor is always right. I talk to Medicare beneficiaries every day and it is amazing how many people agree with this but how out of touch Congress is about this matter.

If we could just be more judicious about our choice of words I believe that would do more than all the lobbyists in Washington to change the nature of the debate about health care reform. According to CMS, administration expenses, and by that I assume they mean insurance and other administrative costs, are 14 cents of every health dollar spent. If we are paying twice as much for our health care system as several reports show that we are then insurance reform is a 10% solution for a 50% problem. Even someone that survived our public schools should have figured out that isn't going to work.