Sadly, I think it is too late. This interview should bring us all chills down our spines.
| 30 Minutes with Dr. Coburn |
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Tom Coburn, MD (R-OK) is one of only two physicians serving in the US Senate. He’s known for his opposition to earmarking and has taken a strong stance against the current health care reform bill. EPM tracked down Dr. Coburn to ask him why.
Interview by Mark Plaster, MD
 EPM: We understand that you oppose the current health reform bill in the Senate. What do you see as its major problems? Sen. Tom Coburn: This bill will ultimately divide the loyalty of the physician, not to be a 100% advocate for the patient, but to be sure and cover their backsides, so they don’t get in trouble with the government. The cost comparative effectiveness panel? You’re going to have to do things the way they think you need to do it. This [bill] guts the art of medicine. For 80% of the people that will be just fine. But we will have changed our focus to the cost of medicine from the health of the patient. What’s the other bad thing about the bill? It’s going to raise everybody’s taxes. It’s going to raise everybody’s costs and it’s going to raise everybody’s insurance premiums.
EPM: Assuming that we need to control cost, what’s wrong with how this bill goes about accomplishing this task? Coburn: The assumption [in Congress] is that we need to spend more money to control costs. That’s ridiculous! One in three dollars that we spend in health care today doesn’t do anything to help people get well or prevent people from getting sick. I have a friend who now practices medicine. He’s an internist and a great doctor. A year ago he quit taking Medicare and Medicaid. All he does is cash business. He let four people go in his office. He only has one employee now. Those four people weren’t doing anything to help people get well. They were doing the business of medicine rather than the health care of medicine. Truly, 50 to 60 percent of the overhead of every health care organization is spent complying with the rules and filling out the paperwork. [My friend] now sees fewer patients, says he’s practicing the best medicine he’s practiced in his life, and he makes the same amount of money. His prices are very reasonable. And if someone doesn’t have money, he’ll still take care of them. Coburn: No. It will not increase the number of family practitioners. This bill does nothing to pay family practitioners more, it only helps them pay off their loans. One in fifty doctors who graduated from medical school last year went into primary care. Just one in fifty. So how do you incentivize people to go into primary care? You pay them more! What [the government] is going to do is provide all of these subsidies for loans, but [medical students] won’t go. They’re going to realize that they can spend one more year in residency and earn twice or three times the earnings over the long haul. EPM: What do you think will happen if this bill passes? Coburn: Forty-five to fifty year old doctors are not going to play this game. If they have a way to retire, they are going to do it. EPM: Will we have more specialists or fewer? Coburn: If you use real accounting, this is a $2.5 trillion bill that will run massive deficits. Here’s why. Number one, Congress will never cut Medicare. That’s $500 billion more. Number two, the doc fix. The doc fix will get fixed, but they’ll never cut spending somewhere else to pay for it. That’s another $274 billion. Then we’re going to increase those eligible for Medicaid. And we don’t have the money to pay for it. And then finally, everything you buy in health care now is going to get a new tax on it. Your drugs are going to get a new tax, your insurance is going to get a new tax, your medical devices are going to get a new tax. And then finally, since they charge you only $750 to not have health insurance, what do you think healthy people 40 and under are going to do? They’re going to take the $7000 or $8000 that they were contributing to their employer and they’re going to keep it, pay the $750, put $4000 away every year and if I get sick, then go buy the insurance. What’s that going to do to the insurance industry? The healthy people are not going to be in the pool. So the pool is going to be smaller and the pool is going to be made of sicker, older people. So everybody’s premium is going to rise. So not only are we going to have massive deficits from it, but the price that everybody pays is going to go up. Plus, we’re going to tax small businesses, we’re going to tax individuals, we’re going to raise the Medicare tax and then take the money from Medicare – which has a 75-year unfunded liability of $39 trillion – and create another government program. EPM: Can you explain your numbers? Coburn: Over the next ten years, 55 million more Americans are going to go into Medicare. The baby boomers. My generation. We’ve been paying in, but the amount of money to pay for our health care is in deficit by $39 trillion over the next 75 years. In other words, that’s what we’ve promised but don’t have in the bank. And that’s the differential after the taxes are collected. So if you’re going to raise the Medicare tax, it ought to go to fund that differential rather than create another government program. If you were to go back and look, when did health care inflation start at 2.5 times what the regular CPI was? When they instituted Medicare. Why? Because we have this disconnect between the purchase of health care and payment. EPM: So how do you bring cost under control? EPM: Would that really change the way we practice?
Coburn: It would over time. It would take 10 or 15 years for the changes to happen on the physician side. We’ve developed this habit [of defensive medicine] because of being sued inappropriately. EPM: What other ways can we lower health care costs?
Coburn: Create real competition and transparency in the insurance industry. And you can only do that by allowing people to buy what they want. So if I want to buy a $25,000 deductible policy and I can find someone in this country to sell it to me, I can buy it. I can’t do that now. I live in Oklahoma. The highest deductible policy you can buy is $7500. Also, allow associational group health plans. Let small businesses come together and pool their resources and contract out on a broader base of indemnification. Small businesses have no buying power, so you allow them to combine. Finally, allow the markets to function. The problem with all of these bills in Washington is that they’re government centered, not patient centered. EPM: You don’t seem very optimistic about your colleagues in the Senate.
Coburn: What ails Congress today, in my view, is people who are making decisions at this level who have never done anything except politics. They are wonderful people, they care about the country, but they are clueless when it comes to common sense.
I don’t think anyone with less than 20 or 25 years of experience in life should be in politics; someone who has been around the block and knows how to prioritize things. The problem with Washington is that they don’t want to prioritize anything. They just want to keep charging it to our kids. |