Health care and jobs are the two lightning bolt issues in this campaign. Health care is the issue that I am the most qualified to speak about of any of the other candidates because I am a practicing orthopedic surgeon. In addition, I authored the only book on health care written by any candidate for any high office in the country this year. The book is entitled Anathema! America’s War on Medicine, Trafford Publishing.

I will divide health care into several segments because it is just too large of a subject to explain all at once. The book is divided into two parts. Part I examines how various factors sent into the destruction of the world’s greatest health care system. For example, in 1970, the USA was ranked #1 in every category. The cost was only $356 a year per person. Individuals could go to any doctor, any hospital, have virtually anything accomplished without co-pays or deductibles. Compare that to today’s cost. In the book, I used 2008 statistics for the costs. They are larger now, but they still provide a striking perspective as to how the costs have soared. In 2008, the cost of a health care plan averaged over $8,000 per person for a policy that had incomplete coverage, co-pays for virtually everything and deductibles that made it impossible for most families to afford. So, many families ended up funding most of their health care out of their pocket. In many cases families went without health care because of the high deductibles, but they still sent premiums into the insurance companies that reported record profits.

In contrast to other events, for example, in the 3rd quarter of 2008, the price of gasoline soared to near record levels. People were paying upwards of $3.50 to $4.50 a gallon for gasoline. Exxon registered a 3rd quarter profit of $10 billion and the country came unglued. Now for a company the size of Exxon, $10 billion is not surprising to me because they sell gasoline to 300 million people in the USA. Now, compare that to the profit that a major health care insurance company registered in the 1st quarter of 2009. That was $22 billion and they only sold insurance to 7.5% of the country. Their CEO took home a bonus reported at $1.74 billion. No one blinked an eye and it hardly made the evening news. People were getting ripped off at the gas pump and there were near riots, but when they were getting ripped off in the health care dollars, there was hardly a whimper.

Medicare that year registered an expenditure of $384 billion for 38 million people, roughly 10% of the country. If one examines the administrative costs of the program, the estimate at several of the larger medical conventions was bandied about as $400 billion. So for 10% of the population, our country spent nearly 4/5ths of $1 trillion on health care when the entire health care bill for the country was $2.2 trillion. It does not take a Harvard degree to do the math to see how government medicine fails us at the cash register. 

The costs are getting worse. In the August 17, 2010 Akron Beacon Journal, they reported how the major candidates for Governor are ducking the health care issue because of the deficit in the State budget. The federal government gave Ohio $530 million of borrowed money for a bailout to keep the state solvent and keep Medicaid afloat and $360 million to keep 5,500 teachers from being laid off. The Beacon Journal wrote:

“The $531 million Ohio will receive for its Medicaid program does not begin to confront the galloping growth in the costs of the program. The state spent $14.7 billion on the program last year – more than a quarter of the state’s annual budget—to provide health care to 2.1 million Ohioans. The program has grown an average of 8 percent, double the rate of growth of the entire state budget. Such trends do not bode well.”

Remember that this figure is 25% of the state’s annual budget. If we had to put everyone on Medicaid in the state, the cost would simply put the state out of business.

There has to be a better way. Anathema! America’s War on Medicine tells how the system can be brought back to 1970 levels of cost with full and complete care, no denials, no co-pays and no deductibles. The government programs fail because the actuarial tables are too small. There is literally no money coming in from healthy people like there would be in a standard insurance actuarial table. If we want to start to cut health care costs, we are going to have to have the largest actuarial table there is to spread the risk. That involves the entire population of the United States. It involves Universal Health Care, but in order for it to be cost effective, we have to remove the government from the formula because their administration costs are just too high and their functions are too large and inefficient.