American’s fear having to wait for anything. We want to order things from the comfort of our own home and have them delivered in two days. We don’t want to wait behind more than three people in line at the grocery store, and we don’t want to wait for medical care (to be honest these are all examples from my own life – not picking on anyone who isn’t like me here). Our fear of waiting is used as a reason against universal health coverage. We are told about Canadians who cross to the United States to have surgeries that they would have to wait several months to have in Canada. We are told that we won’t be able to schedule an immediate primary care appointment if more people were to have access to health care. And we are told that the high costs of medical care stop unnecessary care from happening, preventing us from having to wait to see a doctor.
However, these fears of waiting and the specter of rationing care presented to us in these scenarios is overblown. It is true that some Canadians chose to get care in the United States for elective procedures, but presenting that fact to us in isolation is misleading and done in bad faith. The reality of our waiting for care is much more complex. Dave Chase does a good job of explaining it in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, “People often raise the specter of rationing care. In reality, it’s overuse (i.e., unnecessary and potentially harmful care) that leads to reduced access by squandering enormous financial resources that would be better used for individuals who actually need care and can’t get it.”
We act as though our healthcare system is following good market incentives to find a good balance between wait times and receiving the right care. But we often fail to acknowledge that our healthcare system isn’t performing like an ideal market, and that it often pushes people to too much of the wrong type of care. Chase details this in his book with unnecessary back surgeries. Those who have a legitimate need for a back surgery might have to wait, because primary care providers get a bonus when they refer patients to orthopedic surgeons who are paid to operate. The right path for a patient might be physical therapy, but the money for the providers is in the surgery.
We should not raise the specter of rationing care when we are so wasteful with the care we provide through our current system. We waste a lot of money when we don’t have a concern about rationing care, and when we reward providers for doing more surgeries, prescribing more pills, and offering more treatment, even if the efficacy isn’t proven. In his book, Chase doesn’t advocate for a universal coverage system with healthcare covered by the federal government, but he does show how employers today can do more to ensure their patients get more of the good care (the effective PT and preventative check-ups) for free. This reduces the demand on the expensive and unproven treatments later on, and actually reduces the demand on the system for services that we are afraid of rationing.
Novel Learning 