Guest Editoral: A Practical Proposal for Health Reform

As part of a new, continuing series at Who Is IOZ?, we have asked Dr. Dolores P. Donmi to contribute the following editorial on Health Care Reform. After nearly three decades in private practice as one of the nation's foremost clinical phrenologists and anthroposcopists, Dr. Donmi is now a Senior Managing Executive Editorial Fellow at the center-left Center for an American America Foundation, a Senior Contributing Editor At-Large for the popular journal of art and politics, Res Pubia, and the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Professor Emerita of Biological Sciences at Stutts University.

It is our hope that by bringing you the premier, non-partisan experts in fields of contemporary significance, we can help transcend the rancor of daily politics and illuminate the complex issues facing our society today in an informative and, ultimately, productive manner.

A PRACTICAL PROPOSAL FOR HEALTH REFORM
-Dr. Dolores P. Donmi

With partisan passions running hotter than ever in Washington and around the country, the important debate over reforming health care in America looks increasingly like a cable shout-fest, or a three-ring circus. Liberals, who had hoped that the Obama presidency would bring with it a push for a European-style public health provision are dismayed by the administration's piecemeal and seemingly hands-off approach, while Conservatives are split between some moderates who rightly worry about the costs of new programs and an unfortunate number of farther-right hold-outs who have been stoked to hysteria by dire warnings of socialism.

Despite the rising volume of the debate, everyone agrees that the packages working their way through Congress and its committees are increasingly Byzantine, stuffed with mandates, loop-holes, regulations, tax breaks and tax incentives, carve-outs, hand-outs, opaque requirements, and confusing standards. But there is a simpler solution, one which addresses the concerns of all sides and the very real, rising cost of health care in a uniquely American way that is uniquely American.

Proponents of universal health coverage often point to the seemingly superior statistical results of European systems to justify their positions. However, another metric, rarely raised in this discussion, might provide a window of opportunity. I have long believed, and recent statistical studies bear out the thesis, that America excels in what I have termed Publicly Funded and Subsidized Early and Premature Mortality, or PFSEPM. Indeed, while no single PFSEPM program exists at either the state or federal level, our current grab-bag approach, full of inevitable inefficiencies, has for the past five decades substantially outpaced results from Europe and Canada, as the following graph demonstrates.



Furthermore, though preferred methods differ, there is broad bipartisan consensus that some public provision for human mortality is within the legitimate purview of the government, making legislative compromise a real and immediate possibility.

How would a federalized system of PFSEPM work to solve our health care woes, particularly the plague of rising costs? Simple. Under the current system, a patient requiring the services of a health provider must make an appointment or else show up in the emergency room, must sign in, must be examined, must be discharged immediately or receive additional treatment. Subsequently, the patient must pay for services, or else the patient's insurer must reimburse the provider for services rendered. Could it get any more complicated!

But a federally administered PFSEPM, or FAPFSEPM, would eliminate all this unnecessary complexity by instituting a simple, universal, and federally funded voucher system, through which every citizen would be eligible, without complex regulatory loopholes or a lot of small print, for early or premature mortality.

Rather than creating new agencies and bureaucracies, we believe that service provisions could easily be provided by the Department of Defense, and that the resultant elimination of duplicate services and administrations would make the proposal not merely budget neutral, but budget negative, reducing expenditures significantly within the first few years of the program, with an actual and realizable target of zero expenditure by 2049. The cost of health care is killing us. It is time for a new approach.