Three Words, One Circus; Medicare Open Enrollment.

Three words, one circus; Medicare open enrollment. On the surface, the goal seems simple enough: provide health care services for senior citizens and those who are permanently disabled. Subcutaneous exploration reveals a dark labyrinth of confusion, full of dubious pitfalls and misinformation, with little explanation for those who take time to seek it. Every year most Americans go shopping for health insurance, they call it open enrollment, and for working people who receive benefits through their employer based plans, a lot of the shopping has already been done. Still, many people find it very confusing and difficult to think through the limited amount of decision making they are left to make. Seniors have it worse; they don’t have a human resource department with trained people to make decisions; they have to do it all themselves. Making it worse, insurance companies that provide medicare benefits have to market their products to individuals like any other product, sell sell sell. Now, if seniors were well informed and companies always acted with integrity the environment might not be as threatening, but the current system has created exactly the opposite situation, and plenty of companies try to take advantage of trusting, ill informed Medicare enrollees.

Over time, many managed care organizations have carved out specific benefits to other organizations. For instance, most people have a vision plan, a dental plan, etc. Medicare is no different. The one benefit that has been carved out but is just a little different in nature than the others is the pharmacy benefit. The dental plan wants you to have great teeth, the vision plan wants your eyes to be fine. It’s in their best…

The War of Tugs: American Access to Health Care

The Healthcare Industry is a fascinating battleground of differing views and opinions, agendas and priorities, ignorance and intellects; a metaphysical community that binds together not just few, but all humanity. To further add complexity to an already chaotic environment, a moral and ethical stigma of each person’s inalienable right to access the highest quality, best available resources exists in a way the right to access food and water dose not even compete. Being on the forefront of thought and concern for so many people, healthcare has catapulted to importance in the political arena. With so many interests simultaneously pushing and pulling in all different directions, the need for unification and direction are paramount. However, one of the biggest concerns that policy makers need to understand is that decisions to address specific problems will undoubtedly change other aspects of the health delivery system. (Shi & Singh, 2008)

The hottest topic in the political arena today with concern to healthcare is access. Most people believe along the lines of what Drs Shi and Singh (2008) report:

An acceptable health care delivery system should have two primary objectives: (1) it must enable all citizens to access health care services, and (2) the services must be cost-effective, and meet certain established standards of care. In many ways, the US healthcare system falls short of these ideals. (p. 5).

The problem is that both objectives are at odds with each other, and no system under finite economic constraints will ever completely bridge the gap. The idea that drastically altering the American means to access will provide better healthcare is a categorical mistake. While the demand for health care is infinite, the supply…