Posted by
Conrado Brenna on Sunday, August 16, 2009 7:04:10 PM
Lately, all over the media, citizens have been appearing in town halls to
say what they think about the health care reform. Among the top comments,
several were about the money used to generate the health care reform, and other
were about pre-existing conditions. Of course, the latter mentioned are only
some of the thousands and thousands of things said during the past month.
However, one huge and important thing has been missed, and that is the possible
shortage of health care if the reform is passed by congress. Shortages usually
happen when prices for products and services that are usually high (in this
case in the cost of health care and life insurance), are artificially lowered
by the government, causing a severe shortage. In other words, by lowering the
cost of health care for Americans who earn less than $250,000, the government sells
a cheaper version of this service for relatively unlimited use by the people.
The problem is the following: people who usually go to the hospital for severe
problems, such as a broken arm or other treatments that require trained
professionals, are now going to go to the hospital for a minor headache, etc.
This would create and extremely high demand for care, even though the supply
would be very limited. Next, people who actually need a rather important
treatment will have to wait in line for a long time to get treatment, since
other citizens will use hospitals excessively. The results might end in life or
death situations! After the first problem the government is going to encounter,
life insurance companies are going to experience an even worse situation. Since
a lot of people will be using public hospitals for treatments, insurance
companies will find it useless to build new hospitals, making it highly
unprofitable. On the other hand, with such demand and a tight budget at flat
prices, the public hospitals will soon find themselves overwhelmed, and it
would be very hard to maintain them, leaving them crumbling and almost not
meeting the standards. People will soon realize that it isn’t worth the waiting
to get public care, and will go back to the private insurance companies for
care. From that point on, health care will be used by not many Americans, but
paid by so many more.