Like BBs In A Boxcar

October 12th, 2020 by Tom Lynch
Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.
          The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

 

One thing COVID-19 has certainly done is to expose many of the foundational flaws in America’s healthcare house that Jack built, the house that “cannot hold.” From the Trump administration’s helter-skelter response, to the unequal treatment of Blacks and Latinos, to the near total reliance on China for PPE, to the exacerbating plight of rural hospitals, to jaw-dropping surprise bills, to something as granular as the price of insulin, and the list goes on.

To illuminate the dire situation even more, the Kaiser Family Foundation last week published its annual Employer Health Benefits Survey, which showed the average annual premium for a family of four has grown 4% over the last year, more than doubling the rate of inflation, and has now reached $21,342, with worker contributions averaging $5,588. Add in the average deductible of $4,000, along with copays of $40, and employees get their hair-raising, once-a-year healthcare sticker shock.

In 2020, the U.S. is spending 18% of GDP on healthcare, according the Office of the Actuary within the CMS. For years, I’ve been quoting Herb Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And for years, I’ve been wrong. This cannot be sustainable, but so far it has been.

A distant second-most-costly-country-in-the-world is Switzerland, at 12.1% (which is what the U.S. spent 30 years ago in 1990). The Swiss, as do many other OECD countries, have a decentralized system similar to ours, a blend of public and private-pay healthcare, with two important differences: First, since 1996, government, wanting to spread the pool, has required the Swiss people to purchase healthcare insurance, similar to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate (which Congress eliminated when it passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, effective 1 January 2019). The result is for more than 20 years the Swiss have nearly 100% participation, but not the U.S.; our rate of the uninsured is going up, not down, made worse, much worse, by job, and consequently health insurance, losses due to the pandemic. Second, government plays a large role in establishing prices, especially for pharmaceuticals.

I think we can say with total certainty that, regardless of what you hear or read, nobody knows what healthcare in America will look like a year from now. If Trump wins reelection and republicans hold the senate, the ACA, or what’s left of it, could find itself buried deep beside Davy Jones’s locker at the bottom of the ocean, and what would come after that? Back to square one. People, our fellow citizens, our friends and relatives with chronic conditions, would once again find themselves walking down the edge of an economic razor blade.

There are four possible outcomes:

  1. Trump wins and republicans hold the senate, as above;
  2. Trump wins and democrats take the senate, resulting in stalemate, but the Trump reality show continues;
  3. Biden wins and democrats take the senate, in which case big changes are coming; and,
  4. Biden wins and republicans hold the senate, resulting in stalemate, but we’re saved from Trump’s histrionics (one hopes).

Options three and four spare us the president’s governing style, which is to say, chaos. For four years we have been subjected to his whipsawing and dangerous administration. His policies, personality and pronouncements seem to bounce around like BBs in a boxcar. Never more so than in the last few weeks. Things change by the hour. Nothing is predictable, except unpredictability.

We are moving inexorably into the winter of our continuing discontent. God help us all.

Tags: