Healthcare Daily Digest for 4 March: Should Business or People Pay for Employee Healthcare?

On a site called EnterStageRight.com, a man named Alan Caruba is angry about healthcare: “Having had the Affordable Care Act (ACA) forced on us by a Democrat-controlled Congress—some of whom had to be bribed for their vote—Americans are beginning to learn that the cost of healthcare is going to increase, people will be laid off, have their hours reduced, or simply not hired at all as the result of this horrid new law.”

Healthcare is going to cost someone something. It’s the nature of healthcare. It’s the nature, actually, of everything in a capitalistic society: you want something? There’s a price for it. And while Caruba and others of his stripe are upset at this cost being passed on to businesses — businesses that will lay off people, reduce their hours, or simply not hire them in order not to have to care for their employees — the alternative is what we have now: a lot of people with no healthcare.

That something is deeply wrong with how we access and pay for healthcare is not up for debate. We have a terrible system. We also have programs like Medicare that, as it turns out, are incredibly easy to scam — keeping the costs elevated to cover the losses. But this has become a partisan fight: to be a Democrat, you have to support the Affordable Care Act; to be a Republican, you have to be against it.

It’s thinking like this that’s going to make healthcare reform impossible. It’s not the reform itself, but the narrative around it that will muck it up.

Monday’s headlines:

• A Terrible Game of Tug-of-War: “Blanco is caught in the middle of a tug-of-war between doctors and nurses over who will provide basic primary care for the 30 million U.S. citizens expected to get health insurance under the 2010 health-care law.”

• If There’s One Place You Want More Scrutiny…: “Philadelphia City Council members are up in arms over the mayor’s decision to renew a huge contract for prison health care to a company that was recently forced to pay nearly $2 million to settle the city’s fraud claim.”

• It’s Like That Pie from The Help: “Fiona Clarke, 40, fired home health care worker in Norwalk, CT is accused of leaving feces in her former employers’ oven and refrigerator after a work-related dispute, reports Raw Story.”

• All That Technology Comes at a Price: “Almost a year ago I wrote about how healthcare costs have risen catastrophically for many people,” writes Mark Gibbs, “and how one of the major contributing factors is the increased use of technology in medicine.”

• Maybe Children ARE the Future: “Three students at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing have developed award-winning healthcare technology.”