Third Parties:  Our Costly Curse 

We complain about many things nowadays – the cost of Medicare, the cost of all types of insurance, tuition, taxes, the cost of almost everything.  Seldom do we stop to think about why such costs have skyrocketed.  Now, when politicians of both major political parties are adding to the list of things to which they say we are “entitled,” and blurring the line between necessary and nice to have, it’s a good time to pause and point the finger at a key factor.  It has been about 30 years since I last paid a Physician directly for my or my family’s doctor’s visits, and that was unusual even then.  At the time, Doctor B., let’s call him, was in his late 80s, had his commission as a Lieutenant (signed by President Woodrow Wilson) hanging on the Waiting Room wall, still made house calls, and charged three dollars for an office visit.  Since then, like you, the cost of my health insurance is deducted from my salary and the doctor, the nurses, the labs and I all deal with a Health Insurer rather than directly with each other.   If, despite our best efforts, we end up in an auto accident, what happens?  We exit our vehicles, exchange the information on our insurers, and they handle it for us.  One of us gets a check; the other gets points on the driver’s license.  Despite the exchange of thousands of dollars for the vehicles (and, often, many times that for medical care) the odds are that we probably will never see each other again. In both of the foregoing cases, the total cost is somewhat hidden from us.  We pay monthly; there are deductibles that are only a small part of the total cost.  Most feel that “someone else” pays the total tab. If you’re beginning to see a pattern here – good.  The pattern exists, it is pervasive, and it not only doesn’t save us money, in my judgment, it costs us billions of additional dollars annually collectively.  The extra money results from the intervention of a Third Party in the process.  If the aforementioned Dr. B. had announced to his patients that his fee was going up to four dollars per visit, an increase of one third, I may have gladly paid it.  Then again, I may have gone shopping for another doctor.  It is also possible that Dr. B. may have held off increasing his fee, at least for a time, rather than tell his patients of a higher cost.  Regardless, the point is that the choice was his and the choice was mine, not the choice of a third party.  I did not receive in the mail an announcement of an increase from an anonymous person in my health insurance premium (I don’t recall ever getting a notice of a decrease).  This Third Party principle operates well beyond the world of insurance, of course.  The biggest, strongest, most pervasive Third Party of all is local, state, and federal government, including public education.  The latter is fast becoming the oxymoron of the century…………..again.            Has one of your children had a run-in at school that resulted in a phone call to you and your being told that you needed to come in to school?  Chances are you never even glimpsed the other child, much less the other child’s parents.  The odds are that you were taken to the office of a Guidance Counselor, listened to a recitation of the rule or rules broken (even if your child was not at fault), and felt more like a child again than a parent, an adult.  At the end of the session, during which the main contribution requested from you was to nod your assent, you were shown to the exit and went home or back to the office.  What was resolved? In other parts of the public sector, labor unions, especially public sector unions, don’t negotiate with us despite the fact that we are their clients, their bosses, their customers.  They negotiate with the city, the county, the state.  This, we are told is done on our behalf.  Then, of course, there is Law Enforcement.  You may admire Mr. Joe Horn of Texas for his courage – and his aim – in killing two illegal aliens committing a burglary next door to his house on November 14th, but the odds are that if you attempt the same thing in other states or the District of Columbia, you’d better be prepared for a long stay in the penitentiary.  In the area of our personal safety, the responsibility, by and large, has been turned over to Public Safety personnel.  The Courts System decided this incrementally, by the way, rather than our demanding it.  At the very top, in case you think Courts of Appeals will save us, the US Supreme Court decided in 2005 that the State of Connecticut could legally take people’s homes and demolish them to make way for commercial development in the city of New London.  This decision was a stark reversal of the Robin Hood principle and took from the poor to give to the rich – developers.  And now – we’re told by a number of candidates for President of the United States — here comes Universal Health Care.Dress it up anyway you want; put a whole tube of lipstick on that pig, it’s still a pig………….you can tell by the smell.