Mathematica Cost Analysis: Confusion is Good for Private Healthcare Biz!

Surprise, surprise. "Reducing multiple payers reduces non-medical costs", said Dr. Deborah Chollett, lead study author for Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., to a panel of Richardson Cabinet members, legislators and health policy experts this week in ABQ when describing the benefits of the Health Security Act model of universal coverage. How? The overhead, health benefits (!!) and salaries of the people who kick you off coverage & programs, or fail to tell you about coverage & programs, are all "non-medical costs".

This astute scientific finding on the inefficiencies of administrative waste passing for healthcare policy should come as no surprise to anyone living with the consequences of our current failure of a privatized multi-payer "mis-managed care" healthcare funding system. If you are one of the many who has been rationed out of coverage or forced to enroll in one of a zillion health coverage programs or market products, this economic analysis is not news to you: You feel it every time you need to see a doc or a nurse practitioner, or fill your monthly 'scrips, and can't find, access or afford them.

What exactly is the connection between how we as a society pay for healthcare and whether or not we receive it, individually? As the State's Health Care Coverage for New Mexicans Committee heard this week, that connection is mass confusion! As too-many-to-count members of the HCNM Committee put it this week, in exasperated response to this report, "I understand 50% of this...at most!"

Since disempowerment breeds the status quo, and since the status quo has left most of us uninsured or underinsured, let's fix this condition of intentional ignorance and demand healthcare as a basic human right for all in our state. Check out the links to the right - the Mathematica Report, news, how other countries do it, etc - and decide for yourself.

Are you willing to pay $.17-.28 out of every $1.00 to administrators, brokers or billing coders that are the back-bone of a multiple-payer system like we now have, or would you rather centralize your healthcare dollars into one payer, publicly managed, at $.02-.05 per $1.00 administrative cost? Every other industrialized nation has decided...when will we?