aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Health care hopes

Major article in the Times today about the labyrinth of paperwork our health care system inundates us with:

Medical paperwork is a world of co-payments and co-insurers, deductibles, exclusions and contracted fees. Nothing is as it seems: patients receive statements that often do not reflect what is actually owed; telephone calls to customer service agents are at best time-consuming and at worst fruitless. The explanations of benefits that insurers send out - known as E.O.B.’s - are filled with unintelligible codes.

The system is so impenetrable that it mystifies even the most knowledgeable.

“I’m the president’s senior adviser on health information technology, and when I get an E.O.B. for my 4-year-old’s care, I can’t figure out what happened, or what I’m supposed to do,” said Dr. David Brailer, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, whose office is in the Department of Health and Human Services. “I can’t figure out what care it was related to or who did what.”

Nathan Newman had a post this week suggesting there’s hope for national health care. Employer provided health care coverage is down and dropping further:

[I]n addition, copays and other costs mean that even employees with health care coverage are paying more out of pocket.

Which means that fewer and fewer people have a stake in the present system of health care coverage. And unions increasingly see negotiations for health care sucking up all their time and efforts during negotiations, so they are redoubling their efforts to pass serious health care reform. And as large employers providing health care see their profits eroding due to having to compete with countries with national health care systems—and without the costs they face—even some employers can be cajoled around to support.

He points to Ruy Teixeira on what we know and what we don’t know about public opinion on universal health care.