Low-maintenance health insurance
I was only half-listening each time, but I heard a couple times on the radio the assertion that what Americans want for health insurance is choice.
Well, here's one American who doesn't particularly want choice, or, more exactly, choice isn't something I want to need. What I want is what I had for my adult life up to retirement: decent coverage I didn't have to worry about.
As a student, I had access to student health services. I was convinced the student health service at the University of Illinois, Urbana — as opposed to the excellent veterinary-care clinic — was part of an AMA plot to turn young Americans against socialized medicine. Still, the health service was good enough for my undergraduate needs, and when I got older and started earning a bit of money, I supplemented the health service with Carle Clinic, at the time, a real HMO: a low-cost health-maintenance organization.
As a university faculty member and indirect employee of first the State of Illinois and then the State of Ohio, I participated in university health plans. I got insurance automatically, as part of my compensation package. The coverage was good; the co-pays reasonable — and when an insurance company bureaucrat got between me and my physician, I had the phone number of a university bureaucrat whose primary job was running interference for university employees trying to get payments from our insurance company.
The system was imperfect, but pretty efficient.
Shopping, period, is not my idea of a good time — yeah, I'm a guy — and high-risk shopping for something complicated and important is my idea of a very bad time. Shopping was also not part of my job; nor was arguing with 20-something punk insurance company flunkies. Time spent on health insurance would have been time I wasn't doing my job; as far as my employer and I were concerned, it would have been nonproductive, wasted time.
Now I'm retired, and my time is my own; but I'm close enough to death to really value that time, and I'm more anxious than ever to avoid shopping for insurance, reading policies, and/or fighting with corporate "minicrats" professionally obligated to try to deny coverage.
Fortunately, I've got Medicare — or, I think I do (I forgot to make quarterly payments automatic). And I have a pension and a secondary policy through my pension plan.
All Americans should have it as good, or better. Ideally, from this point of view, we'd have a National Health Service, or at least single-payer health coverage. In any event, what I want and what I think we all need isn't particularly choice but one system that is flexible, simple, automatic, and — including considerations of nonwasted time — efficient.
Richard D. Erlich is professor emeritus at Miami University, currently living in Ventura County, California.
This is currently posted on a site called SEDHE, run by a Miami Alum, and is tentatively scheduled for publication in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (it’s also on my myBarackObama page; but it looks like that is now invisible to search engines).
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