Insurance Exec Says Don't Fear Gov't-Run Care

 

Saturday, Jul 18,2009, 11:06:52 AM   Click:

When I was in the army and called my friends that "the fight against Cohen," I could not get by the fact that the American public supports higher spending of the Pentagon, despite an incredible knowledge of waste and theft.

I cite, for example, well known and often seen the looting of food by the mess sergeants. From tasting tips, I can say that the flight is what they have done better.

Now I am equally perplexed. Many, if not most, Americans have some sort of experience in our country mostly private healthcare system.

Yet, they fall prey to the fear tactics that nothing - nothing - could be worse than a government takeover of the system. How it could be worse than they are today, I can not imagine.

In the last two months, I have spent many hours accompanying a loved one to hospital emergency rooms -- all of them privately operated. The rap on what is sometimes called socialized medicine is that if the government ran the system, the wait would be interminable. Well, I am here to tell you that even when the government does not run the system, the wait can be interminable.

And uncomfortable. In one hospital there was not enough space in the emergency room to accommodate all those seeking treatment. My friend got moved from a bed -- where she was relatively comfortable -- to a wheelchair in the hallway. There she sat, in agony, for about six hours. Something similar happened at another emergency room, although this time she was given a cot. The wait, though, was just as long.

The emergency room has become the equivalent of the family doctor. It is where you go if you don't have a family doctor or where you go if you do have a family doctor -- and it's after hours or the weekend.

It is also where you sometimes have to go in order to be admitted to a hospital. The staff is mostly courteous, sometimes wonderfully solicitous, but the constant triaging of new people can put you on a treadmill to nowhere. The emergency room is the great leveler of American life. Everyone gets miserable treatment.

Open-Air Clinic

The other day, Bill Moyers interviewed Wendell Potter about health care and such matters. Potter is the former head of corporate communications for Cigna, the nation's fourth-largest health insurer.

By his own characterization, he is one of those insurance executives who flew from meeting to meeting in private planes and hardly ever touched ground to meet real people. One day he did. He went to an outdoor health clinic over the Virginia border from his hometown in Tennessee. This is what he told Moyers:


"What I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents to care for people . . . and I saw people lined up. Standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee -- all over the region."

Thank God we don't have socialized medicine.

Into this debate about the role of government in medical care, I come jaded by experience. In addition to having been Combat Cohen, I was also Cohen of Claims when I worked for an insurance company. This means that whenever someone says something about "government bureaucrats," I smile because I was once a nongovernment bureaucrat.

Scaring The Public

It is not government bureaucrats who say that certain treatments will not be covered, and it is not the government that purges insurance rolls of the sick or the old, and it is not the government that makes money -- lots of money -- on health insurance. It is private enterprise.

But as Potter points out, the insurance industry sets out to spook the public with talk of "socialized medicine" and "government bureaucrats" and "government-run health care."

My loved one recently had to return to the emergency room because she was dehydrated. Her insurance company listed the reasons someone could return and dehydration was one of them. They still denied her claim. The government had nothing to do with it.