NYT Doesn't Understand Humans

In a New York Times article, Diagnosis: Insufficient Outrage, we're treated to the following revealing statement:

"Medical care is intended to help people, not enrich providers."

I'm sure this would come as a huge surprise to every single person who has invested great time and effort to becoming a trained medical professional. Certainly, many -- maybe even most -- of these people are greatly concerned with helping people. But it is also certain that almost everyone who invests the decade-plus required to be a licensed medical doctor expects to be well-compensated for the investment.

To be a doctor is a vocation that is tied in peoples' minds not only with prestige and respect, but with good, even great, financial compensation. The popular image of the doctor is someone who is well-off: a doctor can afford a great house in a great neighborhood, drive a great car, belong to the country club. Doctors are part of the elite. To the extent that this is ceasing to be true represents a failure of the system. You don't attract the best and brightest by expecting people to invest such a tremendous amount of time and energy in a career solely out of the goodness of their hearts.

And lower down the scale, every nurse, every technician, every medical equipment salesman, every insurance salesman, every actuary, every hospital or healthcare corporation administrator, expects to be enriched by their career to a greater or lesser extent. Nearly everyone hopes to have a job or a career that will lead to some of the better things in life.

Being enriched is exactly what medical care professionals expect.

The attempt to demonize the desire for profit in health care is one of the things that distorts the provision and costs of healthcare.

The system already, even before Obamacare, suffered from massive government intrusion into the cost structure and perverse incentives that favored massive, comprehensive one-size-fits all employer-provided insurance plans over plans that reflected the average person's need for catastrophic coverage while forcing the individual to act as a participating consumer for most day-to-day insurance costs, which would have helped keep costs down, due to competition and the fact that the price pain was imposed directly on the patient, not hidden behind walls of byzantine insurance company price structuring.

Obamacare just makes it worse, weakening even further the link between the consumer and the actual cost of the services he is consuming.