Healthcare in America, will it get Fixed?

From President Obama's latest speech, "We can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold." Good news for who? Bad news for who? Hard to be sure at this point, but we can't hope to go on with the double digit rise of the cost of health care.

As noted by Robert Frank in an artcle from February 2007 (when we weren't so wrapped up in the Economy and it's problems that we could rationally discuss health care issues), he noted that "...we spend more than twice as much on health care, on average, as the 21 countries in which life expectancy exceeds ours. American costs are so high in part because the reliance on private insurance multiplies administrative expenses, currently about 31 percent of total outlays." A certain target for the reformers will be this dubious spending on administrative costs in the system, not on customer care directly.

I am aware of a doctor group, and it's not an unusual situation for the industry, that has over 3 times as many administrative staff as doctors, mostly dealing with receivables. These receivables are a big headache, getting payed by the hundreds of insurance companies with different paperwork, dictates, and procedures, not to mention the complexities of Medicare, is a nightmare.

If the administrative costs are to be addressed, the big losers will be health care insurers, Aetna, the Blues, etc as described in today's article by Reed Abelson in the NY Times. The winners will be consumers, doctors, the companies who insure their workers, and the public in general from lower healthcare prices. This is something to anticipate and be prepared for, the later more so if you are on the insurers side.

Can New Leadership Revive Our Economy?

In THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD by Fareed Zakaria, he descibes the declining US influence in the world order, other than our military power. As China, India, and other countries arise, “in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance.” Is this inevitable, or can the US maintain a leadership position, at least in terms of our economy? He has some good suggestions as briefly noted in this interview:

"America is “becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated — free markets, trade, immigration and technological change”: witness Democratic candidates’ dissing of Nafta, Republican calls for tighter immigration control, and studies showing that American students are falling behind students from other developed countries in science and math."

He goes on to decry the intransigence of these issues as quoted by the article's author, " "economic dysfunctions in America today" are the product not of “deep inefficiencies within the American economy,” but of specific government policies — which could be reformed “quickly and relatively easily” to put the country on a more stable footing. “A set of sensible reforms could be enacted tomorrow,” he says, “to trim wasteful spending and subsidies, increase savings, expand training in science and technology, secure pensions, create a workable immigration process and achieve significant efficiencies in the use of energy” — if only the current political process weren’t crippled by partisanship, special-interest agendas, a sensation-driven media, ideological attack groups and legislative gridlock."

Indeed, we have many challenges and maybe a less divicive leadership can help solve these problems, for the better of all and particularly the small businesses in America.