This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hello and welcome. I'm Dr George Lundberg and this is At Large at Medscape.
You can pay me now or you can pay me later. Perhaps best known as a commercial promoting automobile maintenance, this statement could also apply to healthcare.
Everybody gets sick. If left alone, most acute human maladies fix themselves (automobiles don't), but people with chronic diseases do better if managed sensibly, including with professional help. Some serious illnesses are fully preventable. The effects of many potentially serious diseases can be ameliorated by early diagnosis and intervention.
Who pays? In whose best interest is it for payment to be assured?
Medical expense insurance in the United States began in Dallas, Texas, in 1929 and Sacramento, California, in 1932. Hospitals needed to be paid; surgeons were particularly motivated early on to assure not only that patients who needed surgery would get it, but also that the surgeons would get paid. Surgical fees often exceeded more typical fees for medical care, so out-of-pocket costs (the normal way doctors and hospitals were paid back then) were more difficult for many patients to afford. Usual medical care did not cost much, but then again, neither did it offer much.
Growing up in small-town, lower Alabama in the 1930s and '40s, I did not know anyone who had medical expense insurance. Oddly, many people had burial insurance, which was aggressively marketed and sold.
Once medical (health) insurance became common, medical services (and costs) increased and then flourished—an early example of supply-induced demand. Of course, there were benefits for many.
The enactment of Medicare and Medicaid legislation poured gasoline on the already upward-spiraling healthcare cost fire. That is how we arrived at nearly 20% of the US annual gross domestic product going to healthcare.
Our American Medical Association actually warned the country about that risk.[1] The incipient medical industrial complex developed an insatiable capacity to transfer money by greatly increasing costs, often to gain small, incremental improvements.
Yet, lifesaving medical and surgical interventions do occur, they are often expensive, and someone has to pay for them. Ergo, health insurance. Everyone should have it. Why not?
I live in the Silicon Valley. Many of the key innovations that have revolutionized how the world functions day by day have been begun and are headquartered here. Think Google, Apple, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, YouTube, Salesforce, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, Netflix, etc.
So why would it not make sense for San Francisco to pioneer healthcare for all via innovation?
Click to learn how every uninsured resident of the city and county of San Francisco can access basic healthcare of comparable quality, depending upon the provider, all for a means-adjusted, modest, quarterly participant fee and a small point-of-service fee.
Residents of San Francisco are expected to have health insurance coverage via employment-based insurance, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and Medi-Cal, if eligible, just like all other Americans, with all the pluses and minuses of those programs. But if they don't, Healthy San Francisco is available regardless of immigration status, employment status, or preexisting medical conditions.
The 2008 Health Care Security Ordinance created the authority that underpins the Healthy San Francisco program. It requires businesses to pay a minimum set amount of money on healthcare benefits for its employees.
Restaurant users learn of this expense of doing business by seeing the note, "In response to employer mandates, including the San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance, a 4% surcharge will be added to all food and beverage sales."
Healthy San Francisco is administered by the San Francisco Department of Public Health and delivered via designated Medical Homes. Eligible annual income is set at 500% of the federal poverty limit.
Health insurance it is not, a panacea it is not. It is a safety net below the other safety nets. By July 2010, 50,000 people had enrolled, but by 2019, that number declined to about 14,000. The drop probably represents both low unemployment and the success of California's robust implementation of the ACA via Covered California.
Any other city or county in the United States that would like to provide economic access to basic medical care for its people, without such care being forgone, termed charity, or simply written off as bad debt by providers, could do well by learning from San Francisco's experience.
That's my opinion. I'm Dr George Lundberg and this is At Large at Medscape.
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Medscape Internal Medicine © 2019 WebMD, LLC
Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.
Cite this: George D. Lundberg. Health Insurance for All: Learning From San Francisco - Medscape - Jul 11, 2019.
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