Johnny One Note sings  Insurance Again

            Johnny One Note was a Rodgers and Hart song made popular by Judy Garland in the 1930s.  Judy began ‘Johnny could only sing one note and the note he sang was this – .’  We could adapt this  to ‘Johnny’s health plan  sang one note, and insurance was that song.’  Truly Babes in Arms is where  art imitates life.

            Insurance is everywhere. Insurance means you sleep at night. Insurance means protection. Protection is good? Right? There are all kinds of insurance. Annuity insurance. Car insurance. Crop insurance. Drought insurance. Drug insurance. Disability insurance. Flood insurance. Federal Insurance Contributions Act.  Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Funeral insurance. Health insurance. Home insurance. Life insurance. Malpractice insurance.  Self insurance.

Insurance is popular, if you have enough of it.  And the solution to inadequate insurance, is more insurance.  Utah has perhaps 1,800 insurance companies.

Insurance is the most misused word in English. When one hears insurance, one vaguely assumes insurance will protect against something unpleasant, even dreadful. Hence its popularity. Even when it doesn’t or can’t or won’t protect.  Insurance is associated closely with avoiding disaster and calamity and death and destruction.  Thus in the debate on health care, the media focuses on calamity, injury and sickness. And the solution for calamity is insurance.  Long ago,  a media mogul observed ‘war sells papers’. Meaning disaster gets attention.  Therefore, the logic is disaster sells papers. Calamity is associated with insurance. Hence,  Insurance sells papers.  And in the evolving media, you can substitute television, radio, or social network for ‘papers’. Insurance is the solution to every problem.

Insurance is profitable. How profitable? Very. Go on line and search for largest insurance companies. The largest based on annual premiums is listed as UnitedHealth with between one hundred and two hundred billion in annual premiums. Insurance company assets are huge. TIAA Cref claims management of a trillion dollars. GEICO’s corporate owner is Berkshire Hatheway, whose class A stock hovers at about $330,000 a share. One Share is a third of a million dollars.

Those invested in having the government run health care in America can’t get away from insurance. An example is a column in the Deseret News titled ‘Four ways Republicans to fix health care’ composed by Messieurs Antos and Capretta from the American Enterprise Institute. They begin with the premise that the Republicans ‘want to take health insurance away from millions of people.’  Then, like Johnny One Note,  the authors proceed to rename ‘Medicare for all’ by offering Medicaid expansion (i.e. more insurance),  automatic enrollment (i.e. automatic insurance),  risk sharing (i.e. insurance), and competition and market incentive to control costs (i.e. cost transparency of insurance covered services).

But instead of defending Obamacare, Antos and Capretta should ask, can insurance deliver a baby?  No. Can insurance set a broken arm?  No. Can insurance diagnose a sore throat or pink eye?  No.  If insurance could, the government could just hand out health insurance policies,  hey, hand out ten insurance policies.

So, why change the dialogue? Because the goal  should be great health care and not universal health insurance? Health not health insurance.  Anyway it should be. America has great health care, as regularly confirmed when foreign billionaires leave their country to come to America for major health care.

What is required for great health care? Start with enough health professionals, care givers. Solution? I’ll make the case we need to triple the number of medical school seats, including nurses, dentists, pathologists, pharmacists.  More trained doctors is the ultimate solution to expand health care to everyone, without government rationing.

What is the status of medical education in Utah?  Utah has more golf courses than students entering its medical school. Utah now has two schools as compared to Eighteen hundred insurance companies.   In the twenty first century, America  has fewer medical schools now than at the beginning of the twentieth century.   This was deliberate. Now, America has about three times the number of attorneys  (two and a half million) as physicians (about three quarters of a million).   A fourth of America’s physicians are trained overseas, half of those come from India and Pakistan.   Medicare and health care are about a fourth of the entire annual Federal Budge, about a trillion a year. Medicare gets about 2,100 claims every minute, 24/7/365, or a billion and a quarter claims every year for 45 million or so patients. As recently from 2017 to 2018, the Veterans Administration was unable to fill several openings for physicians in Saint George clinic for over a year.

How many students take the Medical College Admissions Test, the MCAT? About fifty thousand. How many seats are open? About 22,000.  How many positions are available in California for post health training fellowships? 6,000. How many Medical doctors graduate from California every year? 3,000.  From where does California obtain the double of physicians needed to complete and fill the fellowships? California has to lure them from the medical schools in the states from the rest of the country, or import from other nations. By the way, the fellowships are funded by  the Federal Government, so in a way, not only do the other states provide the ‘fellows’ for California, but also chip in with taxes or debt to complete the package.

While medical school education shrank for a century, law school education expanded six fold.  As  a result, while the VA scrambles to find physicians to plug in vacancies in Saint George, there are no shortage of new lawyers for the government to hire, at any level, city, state and Federal.

Conclusion, start a fresh discussion by expanding medical schools. Double the seats, triple the seats.  Use the money budgeted for insurance to expand medical seats.

Disclaimer: The author of each article published on this web site owns his or her own words. The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this site do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of Utah Standard News or official policies of the USN and may actually reflect positions that USN actively opposes. No claim in public domain or fair use.    © Edmunds Tucker. UTopiAH are trade marks of the author. Utopia was written in 1515 by Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England.