New Illinois Law to Centralize Health Care

My eldest daughter works as a billing specialist for a doctor here in Chicago. Her job more or less requires that she familiarize herself with the laws regulating doctors and the insurance industry. Unlike the layman who simply wants to see a doctor when illness strikes and be able to afford the treatments offered in order to get well again, she has to get into the guts of a system that requires 1500+ page tomes trying to determine the cost for treating every malady imaginable. As such, she has been studying a proposed new law, The State Health Care Innovation Plan, or SHCIP, that the Illinois legislature will soon be voting on. It is 200+ pages or so long, and what she has read concerned her so that she gave me the first 8 pages to read to ask me what I thought of it.

I have to admit, I find reading legalese quite tedious, but I was interested in this legislation since it would affect how just about everyone in the state of Illinois goes about shopping for their health care needs. I think everyone should be interested in this law since it puts the state between the patient and one’s doctor and regulates all aspects of the relationship one has with one’s doctor.

The main gist is that all health care providers will need to be a part of an organization. There are, of course, a number of different organizations that can be chosen from. The organizations will be formed around a primary care physician, and all specialty services will need to be referred out through the PCP. The organization will be paid by the insurance companies, not by the procedures they perform, but in a bulk payment, known as capitation, once a month, to be distributed by the organization to their physicians, not by how much work the doctors have done, but by however they see fit. The doctors are becoming slaves and you no longer have a choice in what health care services you’re allowed to receive.

As I read the first 8 pages of this law, the first thing that struck me is that it read more like a report than a law. They were citing statistics. They were pointing out flaws in the current system. They were discussing a vision for the future of health care in Illinois that they had. It was more like I was reading a sales pitch rather than a law. It was almost as if they were trying to justify to themselves what they were about to do as well as to everyone else. Bad ideas often need massive amounts of righteous justification before they are implemented, if for no other reason than to give the politically powerful the ability to use the “good intentions” excuse when things go wrong and individuals are harmed. When I finished reading these eight pages, I had a vague idea of what they were trying to say and do, but I wasn’t quite certain. I wasn’t even sure if it was a law since, well, you know, laws should usually be straight forward and explain what you can and cannot do. I called my daughter and asked her what I had just read, since she has to deal with these matters every day.

Her insight confirmed my suspicions. They are trying to rid the state of private health care practitioners. Any doctor with a private practice will not be welcome in the state of Illinois, and the Illinois state government will go to any length to make sure that anyone who tries to defy them and run a private practice will find it very difficult to do so. If you are not a member of an organization, or some other “health care entity,” as they like to call it, you are going to be subjected to unfair regulations and scrutiny in an effort to scare off the mavericks that might try to question the system.

When I was a kid, we went to a nice doctor that my family knew and trusted for most of our health problems that arose, and as a child I had plenty of health issues. His name was Dr. Gibson and I remember him as a kindly old man who showed genuine care and compassion for us. I remember that my family had a wonderful relationship with this man. It seems to me that this is the kind of relationships the powers that be don’t want us to have anymore. They can’t have doctors actually caring for their patients. That could interfere with the “business” of health care.

A doctor who cares too much for his patients might not care enough about profit and might actually try to buck a system that wants to recommend procedures that are more profitable above procedures that might actually produce a cure for a given condition. They don’t want doctors thinking for themselves, they want doctors to have to come to a consensus. After all, isn’t that what politics is all about, consensus building? It’s only natural, then, that when politicians have their say in the field of health care – and they do have their say for they are creating and passing the laws that regulate it – they create a system they are familiar with.

Combine this with the for profit corporations that have bought out governments at all levels and you have a combination lethal to small businesses and start ups. In the health care industry this means doctors wanting to start their own practices and treat patients one on one, face to face. The corporations don’t want to face that kind of competition and so they ask their friends in powerful political positions to create laws which make it nigh impossible for such competition to grow roots. These for profit corporations are the insurance companies that have come to dominate that industry. They are the ones who want the doctors corralled into “health care entities” so that they can maintain not only control over their activities, but their livelihoods as well. That’s what it boils down to, complete control.

Large corporations like those that dominate the health care insurance industry want to create and protect monopolies for themselves so that they can profit all the more from the services they offer. The best way for them to protect their monopolies is to turn to those who have a monopoly on legitimate force and ask them to create laws to make it difficult for competitors to compete. To accomplish this, the political class has taken to illusion. They want the common folk to believe they are being compassionate. They pass laws designed to profit their corporate buddies under the guise of compassion. At the same time they want to remove anyone else’s ability to show compassion. In essence, it’s not enough that they create a monopoly in health care, they need to create a monopoly on compassion also in order to justify the system they want to establish.

The Illinois law is a tributary of the ACA. It most likely would never have even been conceived if Obamacare had not passed. Now it is taking a bad law and making it even worse. Illinois is trying to become the most SSR like of all the SSRs in the USSA. This law will pass so long as most people remain unaware and allow it to happen. The only way now to prevent such laws from passing is to speak up and speak out against these intrusive and restrictive laws. Let them know you want choice over mandates. Let them know you want the freedom to determine for yourself the kind of health care you want. Otherwise they will continue to take those choices away from you until you have but one choice, their monopoly, and you will take that choice whether you like it or not.

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Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

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