Health Costs Pressing on Everything Else

In today's The Washington Post, columnist Robert J. Samuelson's Health Care Nation op-ed piece chills my liberal soul.

Samuelson, in his regular op-ed column, covers the economic waterfront. This time his topic is how health care reform efforts would create "burgeoning health spending that, even if the budget were balanced, would press on everything else."

We hear wild charges from the GOP that "Obamacare" would lead to "rationing" of health services, if not a full "government takeover." That's not the real problem, says Samuelson. The real problem is that our society, even if the current health care legislation happens to bite the dust, "passively accepts constant increases in health spending" — to the point that government outlays for health care already consume fully one dollar in every four that Uncle Sam spends.

That fraction will only increase under Obamacare. So even if the health bill that may ultimately pass the Senate is as deficit-neutral as proponents say, spending on health care as a percentage of the federal budget will grow and grow and grow, squeezing down spending on the military as well as on "universities, roads, research, parks, courts, border protection and — because similar pressures operate on states through Medicaid — schools, police, trash collection and libraries."

Oops. Unintended consequences galore, those.

Spending on health care is, says Samuelson, a sacred cow that uniquely "enjoys an open tab" in our economy and political system. No one in politics is ready to bite the bullet and propose reforms that would solve "the central political problem of health-care nation." Our huge problem "is to find effective and acceptable ways to limit medical spending."

Why won't anyone bite said bullet? Because "everyone believes that cost controls are heartless and illegitimate." No one wants to deny anyone in America (except perhaps illegal immigrants) "the best health care for ourselves and [for our] loved ones."

I would add that the health services any one of us might quite naturally demand for ourselves, or for our nearest and dearest, might actually not be of any real value, medically speaking. I myself have undergone any number of expensive tests that have proved nothing, as they happened to turn out. For example, I recently had symptoms that were speculatively diagnosed as a prostate infection. But an expensive cystoscopy showed nothing, and it turned out that my symptoms were in fact caused by an allergy to chocolate.

True, I have also had expensive tests and procedures that very likely have saved me from an early grave, such as the replacement of my aortic valve when a Sinus of Valsalva aneurysm was discovered via a CT scan.

There accordingly needs to be some mechanism put in place to keep me and my doctors from going off on pricey wild goose chases, such as the many unnecessary CT scans, MRIs, and other diagnostic procedures I have been given (because my generous insurance plan covers them) over the past several decades.

But, says Samuelson, "It's easier to perpetuate and enlarge the status quo than to undertake the difficult job of restructuring the health-care system to provide better and less costly care."

Amen to that.