Health Care in Utah

Health Care may be coming up in the next Utah legislative session. It seems we have a budget surplus of over 1 billion dollars in the state. Now everyone wants a piece of the pie. I'm not against given it to some of them, as long as they handle it well. It looks like one Utah State Senator (D), Scott McCoy, wants to got beyond deciding what to do with the surplus and create a Utah state constitutional amendment that declares health care a human right.

This is a rough one for me. While I claim to be a capitalist, when it comes to issues like health care, I'm borderline socialist. There are two alternatives when it comes to issues surrounding the uninsured, and the under-insured. We either take care of them, or we let them die.

While our Republican legislative leaders are promising to fund various health care issues, they are also the first ones to talk about the amount of money the uninsured and the under-insured cost us each year.

My personal opinion is that the programs we have in place, such as Medicare and Medicaid, are rewarding the wrong things. Many times a patient's basic care won't be covered, but life threatening conditions will. What happens, then, is that the basic diseases and syndromes get worse, and contribute to the development of long-term life-threatening issues. It's the treatments for these life-threatening issues that cost so much. A better solution, in my mind, would be to fund the best of the basic interventions and preventions. I believe that investing in simple preventative treatments will help halt the development of the life-threatening ones, saving us money in the long run.

Maybe we should try and stop people from getting terribly sick in the first place, instead of enacting a constitutional amendment that may, or may not, actually do anything.