The coronavirus is laying bare the insanity of the American health-care system. EricLevitz writes
Sick, sad country. Photo: Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock The coronavirus crisis looks like it was designed in a lab — to lay bare the insanity of the American health-care system.
Seeking to curb medical inflation — without curtailing elite health-care professionals’ outsize incomes — by gutting hospitals’ surge capacity and discouraging the disempowered from visiting the doctor through high-deductible plans was always injurious. In a pandemic, it’s homicidal.The ideologically inclined are famous for seeing every crisis as a validation of what they’ve always believed. But it isn’t just progressives who see COVID-19 as a strong argument for radically reforming the U.S.
As Americans lose their jobs en masse, Congress hasn’t recognized the folly of employer-provided coverage — but rather discovered the putative necessity of showering that model in subsidies. This is less paradoxical than it appears on first glance. Working people exercise very little political influence unless they form institutions that collectivize the costs of effective civic engagement . Thus, the most politically empowered U.S.
As a matter of advancing the general welfare, providing the newly unemployed with a temporary extension of their employer-provided coverage is madness. Since employer-provided plans pay elevated rates, Uncle Sam could enroll the jobless in open-ended Medicaid coverage for a fraction of the cost.
Hospitals, clinics and physicians’ offices across the country have seen a steep drop-off in business during the coronavirus outbreak as medical centers limit nonessential procedures and patients stay away, fearful of getting ill.That prompted Congress to earmark $100 billion in emergency assistance for medical providers in the most recent aid package. But it left the distribution of this funding to the Department of Health and Human Services.
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