The Medical Industrial Complex

Ok so, the talk on the interwebs today has been all about health care reform - basically there are two points:

A. The White House announced its goal to reduce medical costs by taking the following measures:

(paraphrased)

- Expand information reporting that will help the IRS catch tax cheats... raising $10 billion over the next 10 years.

-Target those who undervalue estate property and gifts, raising another $24 billion over the next 10 years.

-End a tax loophole that gives a multibillion windfall to paper companies, saving more than $1 billion...

B.  Six leading insurance companies have sent a letter to Obama (I'd like to send a letter to Obama) promising their assistance in helping him shed 1.5 percentage points off the growth rate of health care spending.

Why does this matter?  Well, as Paul Krugman points out in yesterday's NYT article, health insurance companies are generally not inclined to take on causes that reduce spending. Let's analyze this approach in light of the insurance company's subtler goals: "reducing over-use and under-use of health care by aligning quality and efficiency incentives" by a theoretical adherence to "evidence-based best practices and therapies."

Analysis of this evidence cannot be at the discretion of these companies, for again our health will always be reduced to the bottom line = profit.  Also, is this evidence part and parcel of existing or on going research? OR by "evidence" do they mean, established results of research efforts that allow a company to avoid alternative therapies that may not have substantial scientific backing and/or avoid risky or radical treatments that may prove effective in some but not without significant expense on the part of the insurance company?

Reducing health care costs is a nice goal...but perhaps does not rightly channel our energies.  As citizens we should be extremely weary of any health insurance company's effort to reduce spending, as their entire premise is not to help any of us, but to make money while spending the bare-minimum necessary to maintain our socially accepted quality of life.  This system itself is unjust by nature, and the only way I see we can escape the profiteering, its to eliminate profit entirely within it.

Anyway, like I mentioned a couple of days ago, I'll look into the history of American health care, and I'll post what I find. I'm curious as to why our system is fundamentally different from the systems in other industrialized nations. 

Until then, eat an apple.