Debate over new hospital misses point
The real question is how can we deliver quality medical care while reducing its costs?
The recent debate over building a new UNM Hospital is symptomatic of our state’s and nation’s inability to have a thoughtful debate about health care. What is government’s legitimate role in providing health care to our citizens? Is it a right or a privilege? Does it respond to market forces, and if not, why not?
As a current health IT company executive and a former health care technology business founder, I can tell you there is no free market in health care. When they are sick, everyone wants all possible resources, and no one cares about cost. If cost is not a driver for rational decisions, the market fails.
Moreover, the government already controls our health-care system. Two-thirds of all healthcare dollars spent in the U.S. are government issued. I am against a government takeover of health care, but we need to recognize that government is already the main player.
A single-payer finance system could be enacted in New Mexico or nationally without touching how we deliver health care. There would be no socialized medicine, since that term implies a takeover of health care delivery — clinicians and hospitals — by the government. Private hospitals and doctors would continue just as they do now.
As the UNM Hospital debate drives home, we keep asking the wrong questions. The issue is not “do we need another hospital?” The issue is how do we deliver quality care and reduce costs? We have the 30th or so best health-care system in the world and the most expensive. Pick any First World country and you will find they spend half of what we do on health care, have better outcomes, have fewer inpatient hospital beds, fewer MRIs, fewer CAT scanners and take care of more sick people by focusing on keeping them healthy. What a concept.
Americans — and New Mexicans — are not getting a good value. We have too many powerful special interests undermining our ability to deliver a good product at a good price. We can’t afford to pay 14 percent of our GDP for health care, and we should not have people declaring bankruptcy or dying because they can’t afford it.
How about UNMH, the governor and the Legislature actually have a deep policy debate about how we deliver health care and not about adding a new facility to a broken system?
All I am saying is that discussing whether or not to build nearly a $1 billion hospital to serve New Mexicans in a fundamentally broken system makes no sense. We have a lot of smart people at UNMH and in the health-care sector in general, but everyone needs to take a step back and help reinvent what we are doing so that we can justify to the taxpayers this huge investment. The money saved in administrative and bureaucratic overhead could be better utilized to serve the health-care needs of the underserved in New Mexico, particularly in a state where almost half the population is on Medicaid.