Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : How To Get Fired in 7 Days from a Big Corporation and Still Bounce Back

Day Minus 7: The Problem with Healthcare in America

My first day was filled with HR crap—signing papers, going over policy, and getting my computer set up. So, rather than bore you with these marginal details, let me tell you why I went into this position knowing that I would spend no longer than five more years in the healthcare industry.

I was laid off this summer when my mid-level healthcare administration position was eliminated along with the rest of my company segment. So, naturally, I headed right to the competition to offer them my services.

The major problem with American healthcare is the fact that the consumer of the product/service being delivered (i.e. the patient) has little to no market leverage to affect the quality or access of medical care. This is because the millions of patients who enter the hospitals and physician offices each day are not the customers of insurance companies despite that they are the consumer of the product. The customers of the insurance companies are other corporations.

Haven’t you ever wondered why you can’t walk into an insurance office off the street and get health insurance rates comparable to those you get through those subsidized by your company? You have to undergo a complete healthcare physical when you take out a personal life insurance policy, so why don’t companies make you do the same during their open enrollment period?

This is because there are legions of orc-like underwriters who perform actuarial studies about the expenses and costs related to administration of your employer’s healthcare plan. They know how much, which diseases, which hospitals, and how long for everything. They then use this analysis to play the numbers; and just like casinos, the house always wins.

Now, what I just said about not being able to get individual health insurance is the bit misleading because you actually can walk into a private broker and purchase an individual healthcare plan but you are going to pay through the nose compared to the expenses you’d be shelling out if you were just to go through your employer. And this fact leads us to the insidious truth behind American healthcare administration—the government is to blame and the only way to fix it is for the government to get the hell out of the process altogether. You see, larger corporations are given enormous tax shelters for the purchase of healthcare for their employees, tax shelters that individuals and small businesses simply are not afforded and it has been this way since World War II.

During the Second World War, American industry was hurting for good workers. Seeing this, Congress passed laws that would shelter the purchase of health insurance for larger employers so they could offer this as an incentive to keep good workers. This was a great idea, but the only problem is that they didn’t rescind the law during the booming 1950s when they should have opened the healthcare market back up to private insurers handling individual cases.

This tax loophole eventually became the epicenter that the entire healthcare system revolved around. Today, the healthcare model is set up for complete and total failure. You have a triangular structure that continues to revolve without improvement. This spinning triangle wheel was squeaking twenty years ago and is shrieking now. Eventually, and very soon, it will completely destroy itself and the health of millions is going to suffer because of wanton waste and greed of sloppy pigs at the trough.

One on point of the healthcare triangle, you have the corporations who are the true customers of health care; they want care for their employees that isn’t going to be riddled with administrative failures and must come in at a cheap price. Healthcare is a sunken cost to corporations in America—there is very little return on investment (ROI) for healthcare expenses besides keeping warm butts farting into office chairs each day.

On the second point of the triangle, you have the patients who are the actual ones consuming the healthcare product. Because they have grown up in a word where the actual costs of healthcare have been shielded and filtered through the companies they have worked for, they have no concept of the value of quality care and they want the best for free. Unfortunately, the reality of basic economics states that we live in a world of scarce resources (there isn’t enough to go around for everyone) which have to be allocated to their most efficient uses (meaning they have to go to the areas which are of the most value to general society); and quality healthcare is not a right or a privilege. There are very real and very high costs involved in receiving access to quality healthcare that the general patient has no concept of and therefore is at a major disadvantage when bartering for services.

On the other point of the triangle are the medical care providers, the doctors, nurses, specialists, labs, and facilities who are caught between greedy corporations who want cheap healthcare and needy consumers who want the best healthcare for free. Add in the douche bag unscrupulous trial lawyers who have effectively driven the costs of medical care up tremendously by forcing the medical establishment to allocate vast resources towards malpractice insurance and frivolous lawsuits, and you have a recipe for the total failure of the American Healthcare system which is happening before our eyes today.

And in the middle of the triangle is the health insurance industry which has been making money hand over fist by keeping the triangle spinning despite the incessant squeaks and groans of entropy as the system breaks down completely.

And despite the enormous amount of power and money the health insurance industry has accumulated in the last twenty years, all closed systems break down over time—it’s a physical fact of the universe and all the money in the world can’t change this fact. The only reason that insurance companies aren’t running for the hills right now is because most of them are too lumbering and dumb to realize that they are standing on the edge of the cliff and the earth is cracking around their feet—their eyes are cast on the amazing sunset that will be their last vision on earth if they don’t wise up like yesterday.

Remember, all it takes is one act of Congress to completely change the game.

This model of Healthcare administration in America has about five more years before the tipping point comes and when it does, things will go in one of two ways:

Socialized Medicine: This would be a disaster. While it sounds great in theory, remember that there are not enough resources to go around for everyone and the only way to get those resources is to have a healthy, intelligent, and forward thinking human race begin to colonize the planets, asteroids, and moons of outer space to secure living space and bring back raw materials and scientific advances which will one day support a common and civil standard of living for all of humanity. Socialism has consistently lowerd the standard of living and the opportunities for advancement throughout history and socialized medicine would be the equivalent of taking a cultural cyanide capsule.
Individual Healthcare Insurance: This means that the tax loopholes which formerly applied only to larger corporations must be extended to small businesses and individuals as well. This also means that health insurance companies which have catered to several thousand companies will be forced to cater to several hundred million individuals and even the biggest health insurers aren’t even close to having the operational and administrative processes in place to accommodate this type of massive change in the market.

Now, I entered this company with all of this in mind and knowing this, how long do you think I would be willing to eat shit from a frontline manager who had the worst case of tunnel vision I have ever come across?

The answer is about seven days.