Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 18, 2009
UTC professor speaks to Women’s Council about health care
Samara Litvack
At the recent meeting of the Women’s Council of Realtors, president-elect Cheree Dumas introduced the speaker, Dr. Bruce Hutchinson, as an officer in the navy who holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has taught at Emory University, Virginia Military Institute, Berry College, Central Michigan University and currently teaches at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga in the economics department.
Hutchinson began the luncheon by saying, “I know you’ve been inundated, if you listen to the evening news at all, with issues about health insurance and ‘Obamacare’ or whatever. I would like to take my time today to talk some about that. I’m going to slice a very narrow part out.”
He addressed some issues he feels are regularly misconstrued by all sides of the health care debate. His focus began with the idea of competition in health care, something about which he felt able, as an economist, to speak.
“The real issue should be health care and yet what the discussion is and the media is almost uniquely and totally health insurance, and they’re not the same animal,” he said. “Health insurance is but one way to begin to fund our consumption of health care resources.”
He emphasized the word “resources” intentionally, saying the first thing he teaches his economic students about is why economics is studied in the first place – scarcity. As individuals and as a society, he said, there are not sufficient resources to produce the goods and services for the collective wants of society.
“The more we have, the more our wants, as human beings, expand,” he said. “The relevance of that to this debate is there will be rationing. There is rationing. There has always been rationing of health care. The issue is how do we do it?”
Possibilities, he explained, include having each individual becoming a central participant in that process, having a significant control put into it or becoming idle bystanders while some “remote bureaucrat” handles it.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I know exactly where I am on that. I’ve lost a couple of medical doctors along the way when I told them I was in charge, they were advising me.”
He shrugged off media outlets that interviewed people from Canada and England who said they preferred their health care system to that of the United States.
“How many of you know what it’s like to be dead?” he asked. “Which do you prefer, life or death? Life? How can you make the comparison because you’ve never been dead, have you?”
He likened this example to the opinions of Canadian and British people. How can they compare their health care to one they’ve never experienced? They’re comparing a known to a totally unknown.
“Throw the debate out at that point because it’s not an informed comparison,” he said.
He segued into the conversation of life expectancy, to which he said, “Talk to any health care expert and they will quickly tell you that the funding of health care is way down the list on factors and their relative importance in impacting our life expectancy. If you want to get serious about life expectancy, you start dealing with people’s diets, you start dealing more generally with their lifestyle.”
Hutchinson then addressed the 45 million uninsured Americans that keep getting so much attention in the media.
“Certainly, with the deplorable economy the last couple of years, many people that had health insurance in this country have lost it,” he said. “But the first thing about that number is that was but one number that was arrived at many years ago by some so-called ‘experts’ when they were asked how many people were uninsured in the United States. And they had a low, a middle and a high, and guess which one has been picked up and we hear about? The 45 million was their high estimate.”
He broke that 45 million roughly into thirds, the first of which, he said, are children. Since every child in this country would be covered by the State Children’s Health Insurance Program if their parents would sign them up, he argued that children should not be included in that number.
“The only reason they’re uninsured is because Mom and Dad are too lazy,” he said. “In recent law, we fund them at what, two or three times the poverty level.”
Another third, roughly 17 million, Hutchinson said are illegal aliens, noting that the only relevant word in that statement is “illegal.” He argued that Americans should not be responsible for providing health care for people who are in this country illegally.
The last third, he said, have incomes above $50,000 a year, adding that any household with that sizable income can afford to purchase health insurance if it so chooses.
“Why can’t this person that you told me can’t afford health insurance, why can’t they?” he asked.
“Do you have a cell phone? Do you have the Internet at home? Do you have cable TV? Because if you have all those things above, you could give them up and afford health insurance. The issue of affording or not affording health insurance is very personal. It’s known as a choice, and I see no reason to reward people that I think make unwise choices. I want to reward people that make wise choices.”
The point, Hutchinson concluded, is that a very small percentage of Americans cannot realistically get health insurance. Rather than focus on the number of uninsured Americans, he suggested concentrating conversation about health care reform on bringing competition into the health insurance industry.
First, he suggested making the rule of one price. No one who is realistically knowledgeable about health care knows what things cost, he said. With a set cost, Hutchinson believes then “real competition” will take place among insurance providers.
“In conjunction with that, we’re going to get a lot of options,” he said.
He referenced the current health insurance option he has at UTC, which includes only two options. He then turned to the Congressional plan, which would offer over 400 different plans.
In closing, Hutchinson expressed his “more important” views on getting employers out of the health insurance business altogether.
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