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Paul R. Hollrah
Universal Healthcare: A Backdoor Approach
September 5, 2008
After living in
our city home for two years, where my healthcare needs were provided by
a Tulsa-based HMO, we decided in May of 2007 to sell our home in the
city and live full time at our lake home, situated in a remote 720-acre
gated community of beautiful lakes, rolling hills, and crystal clear
streams...a place where it’s possible to catch dozens of bass or crappie
in an hour or two of fishing, and the lake is just a short block from
our front door.
Who would begrudge me
the chance to live in a place like this? No one I can think of...except,
of course, the Medicare bureaucrats in Washington who instructed my HMO
that, since I’ve relocated across county lines, they are no longer
permitted to manage my healthcare needs. And since I was unaware of the
rule which requires Medicare recipients to register with a new HMO or
PPO within 60 days of a change of residence (how silly of me not to
invite a Medicare bureaucrat to our real estate closing), I became the
subject of a raging dispute between the Medicare bureaucracy and my new
insurer, Humana, over who, if anyone, would be allowed to manage my
healthcare needs.
Do the Washington
bureaucrats who made that rule care one whit if I live or die? No, all
they care about is keeping their government jobs so that they can have
access to a taxpayer-financed healthcare program for the rest of their
lives. The entire affair tells me that its time to get serious about
solving our healthcare dilemma. So how do we get rid of waste and
corruption, eliminate frivolous malpractice lawsuits, and improve the
quality of and the access to healthcare, while reducing costs to make it
affordable for everyone? That’s a very large order...as Hillary Clinton
learned in 1993.
We can begin by
recognizing that the hundreds of thousands of nameless, faceless
paper-pushers who work for Medicare, Medicaid, the HMOs, and the health
insurance companies, and the tens of thousands of lawyers who, like John
Edwards, make millions suing doctors and hospitals, are pure
non-productive overhead. They contribute nothing to anyone’s healthcare
needs and they can easily be declared expendable. But how do we design a
system in which all of those people disappear?
A longtime friend, a
retired computer whiz who was one of the principal architects of the
Sabre reservation system that is used by all of our domestic airlines,
has suggested the perfect model for transforming our chaotic and
outrageously expensive healthcare system into an efficient and
affordable system. He suggests that we design the basic "architecture”
of universal healthcare by first doing it to the lawyers...Oops! I
should say, by converting our broken and outrageously expensive legal
system into an effective and affordable justice system, which actually
provides equal protection of the law for every citizen...as our Founding
Fathers intended.
Section 1
of the Fourteenth Amendment
contains what is referred to as the "equal protection” clause. It
says, in part, that no state shall "deprive
any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of
the laws.” Nowhere does it say that a citizen is guaranteed equal
protection of the law...only if he/she has the financial resources to
purchase the services of an intermediary who has gone to school to learn
the intricacies of manipulating or circumventing the law.
Logically, the first
step in developing a universal justice system would be to make all
lawyers employees of the state in which they are licensed to practice.
They and their legal assistants would be provided office facilities in
state-owned office buildings and compensated out of funds appropriated
by the legislatures. Those who choose to practice in the arena of
federal law would be compensated under the federal Civil Service System.
Salaries in the legal profession would be commensurate with those in
other professions, such as science, engineering, journalism, academia,
accounting, etc. There would be no more multi-million dollar contingency
fees.
Those persons,
organizations, or corporations involved in disputes requiring legal
remediation would make application for representation to a government
legal services office. Disputes of a civil nature (tort law) requiring
simple finding of fact, arbitration, and determination of liability
would be assigned to general practitioners, while those of a more
complicated nature, requiring special knowledge and experience in
specific areas of the law...taxes, corporate law, intellectual
properties, anti-trust, etc...would be assigned to attorneys with the
appropriate legal specialty.
To insure that the
universal justice system would not become a burden to the taxpayers, and
to insure that complainants would not use the system as a means of
unfairly enriching themselves at the expense of others, the courts would
operate under the British "loser pays” system wherein unsuccessful
litigants would be required to pay court costs, in addition to any
punitive and actual damages awarded by the court.
To avoid any repeats of
the O.J. Simpson debacle, juries would be drawn from a pool of paid
professionals (peers) comprised of retired senior citizens, all of whom
would be required to demonstrate a record of at least fifty consecutive
years free of conviction for any offense greater than a traffic
violation.
The creation of a
universal healthcare system, such as those recommended by Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama, could easily bankrupt the nation and destroy
whatever positive aspects now exist. None of the plans trotted out by
Democrats or Republicans hinge on creating economies, reducing waste and
inefficiency, or eliminating non-productive overhead...a fatal flaw.
The lessons learned
in transforming our dysfunctional and outrageously expensive legal
system could later be applied to the transformation of our equally
dysfunctional and outrageously expensive healthcare system. In a nation
with far too many lawyers and far too few physicians, I vote we first
practice on the lawyers. |
