We’re Suffering From Health Care Stockholm Syndrome
February 18, 2020
For decades, the losers placed their trust, and dollars, in the hands of the winners, and went about their business. Health care costs were a once-per-year conversation and the goal was to get through it. Meanwhile, for the winners, health care was their business, and they spent every day trying to grow it. Now, we ask, has this unequal relationship reached its tipping point or are we all still all-in?
People like me have been saying for years that health care prices are unsustainable and insurers, hospitals, doctors, and Big Pharma should expect a backlash any day now. Wrong. Any day now has turned into ten years and insurers and hospitals are reporting record profits.
It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To The Health Care Status Quo
Our relationship with the health care status quo has all the characteristics of an emotionally abusive relationship. The relationship started out well enough. About 100 years ago, Baylor University Medical Center in Texas offered a local teachers’ union a deal for hospital services. “For $6 per year, teachers who subscribed were entitled to a 21-day stay in the hospital, all costs included. But there was a deductible. The “insurance” took effect after a week and covered the full costs of hospitalization.” Soon, millions entered into insurance relationships, as the Blue Cross Plans expanded to other states.
Then WW II started, and employers started offering health insurance to attract workers, as salaries were frozen by the federal government. Health insurance got complicated as the focus turned to insuring serious illnesses and away from covering primary care (thus the name, major medical plans). Blue Cross teamed up with Blue Shield to create the nonprofit ‘Blues.’ The Blues offer a growing variety of insurance policies at different price points, based on factors such as age and health status.
Soon, several for-profit insurers—e.g., Cigna and Aetna—challenge the Blues’ market share and they aren’t too concerned about health care affordability and access. That was the Blues’ mission, not there’s. The Blues can’t compete with the for-profit insurers, so they too go the for-profit route. Meanwhile, the public’s relationship with the health insurance and health care industries becomes more unbalanced. As their market share and profits grow, health insurers and hospitals start to display all the habits of an abuser:
- They blame the sick for the mind-boggling rise in health insurance and health care costs, even as they pay their CEOs tens of millions in cash, bonuses, and stock options each year.
- They work to stop people from getting help by blocking legislation that would make health insurance and health care more affordable.
- They refuse to take responsibility for the role they play in keeping health insurance and health care unaffordable.
- They manipulate the public into thinking that we could not survive without them and their “innovations.”
Meanwhile, we the abused, express solidarity with our abusers. We stress their good qualities—the qualities they claim to have but really do not. For example, for-profit health insurers claim they offer more ‘freedom of choice’ than government-sponsored health insurance. But according to an analysis by supporters of “free-market” health care, individually purchased and employer-sponsored health insurance coverage offer the least amount of choice among all other types of health insurance. Yet, this easily disproved lie by health insurers, gets repeated by millions of people, to the benefit of the health care status quo.
My guess as to why so many people that are harmed by our high-priced health care system continue to support it is because they don’t know any better. They can’t remember a time before the current model, and they can’t admit that they would willingly take part in such a system if there was a better option. There’s a this-is-just-the-way-it-is mentality. Let’s call it health care Stockholm syndrome.
Stockholm syndrome is defined as “a condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity. Emotional bonds may be formed, between captor and captives, during intimate time together, but these are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims.”
Conclusion
Our health care system has its winners and its losers. The winners keep winning because they write the rules of the game—a game where the losers accept their defeat as inevitable. Maybe someday some group will rescue the losers from their abusive health care captors, but the more likely conclusion is that the losers will run out of money.
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Denise Perkins
