Bad Medicine; The candidates promise new initiatives to end patchwork care. But it's mostly money thrown at a broken and crazy system.

Publication: Newsweek

Publication Date: 25-OCT-04

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Byline: Jane Bryant Quinn (Reporter Associate: Temma Ehrenfeld)

Given a clean slate, no one--repeat, no one --would design a stupid health system like ours. We brag about it as being "the best," and it does indeed deliver mostly competent care. But a system ? Forget it. Every year we spend billions of additional dollars, yet cover a smaller portion of the sick. Massive public subsidies and costly premium payments vanish into the dark pit of private-sector bureaucracy, crazed administrative rules, hard-sell marketing and inefficient care. Whether you get care at all depends largely on where you work (in China they call this the "iron rice bowl"--tying essential life benefits to specific jobs).

And what do our presidential hopefuls want to do? Throw even more money at this wasteful medical patchwork. John Kerry gets full credit for caring more about covering the uninsured--but would that he dared include reform. Spending per person for services covered by private insurance grew 39 percent between 1999 and 2003, says Paul Ginsburg, head of the Center for Studying Health System Change. Over that same period, the number of the uninsured jumped by 14.5 percent, to 45 million. Nearly 5 million more may be stripped of their policies by 2006, say the health-care consultants...

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