I ran across two interesting articles on FiveThirtyEight related to health care. It’s good to understand the history of our weird hybrid system and important to know the facts – but depressing.

[A Department of Health and Human Services

As one of my favorite science fiction franchises says, the answer doesn’t make any sense unless you know precisely what the question is.

report says] health insurance marketplaces set up by Obamacare were relatively stable in 2016. Contrary to the “death-spiral” narrative, the CMS report found that the mix of healthy and sick people buying insurance on the Obamacare marketplaces in 2016 was surprisingly similar to those who enrolled in 2015.

That doesn’t mean the marketplaces are working for everyone. There are millions of people who don’t qualify for subsidies, face high prices in the private market and likely haven’t enrolled in insurance as a result. That’s a problem that needs solving, but it’s a different problem than the marketplaces being in a death spiral.

The agony of repeal and replace is unnecessary – the current political agony and future individuals’ agony if the CBO’s estimate of who loses health care is roughly correct. A bipartisan effort to repair the dysfunctional parts of the Affordable Care Act (drop Obama’s name and maybe the Red Team will feel better) could succeed. Especially if followed by an honest effort to tackle the nation’s real problem – rocketing health care costs.

The two parties agreed only briefly on Medicaid, back when it was first established in 1965. Ever since, Republicans have tried to ratchet back Medicaid, perhaps by imposing per capita spending ceilings or switching the program to block grants. Democrats have gone in the opposite direction, trying to expand coverage.

The back and forth has seen wins and losses on both sides. I’ll pick on Republicans because they’re currently in power: Their claim that a Medicaid card doesn’t get you actual treatment because no one accepts Medicaid leads me to observe – then Medicaid must not actually cost anything so why are you worried about it?

Today Medicaid covers a majority of nursing home patients (after the family has spent down their own savings – I’ve watched that happen), nearly half of all children and births in the nation, and working adults who can’t swing health care.

Medicaid is one of the federal government’s largest expenses, after Social Security, defense and Medicare. It’s the second-largest expense to states, after education.

I can offer one personal story: a lady I know who had surgery for a non-life-threatening condition through Medicaid and thereby went from disability to holding two jobs. They aren’t very good jobs and whatever taxes she pays may never reimburse the government for her treatment – but a measure of independence rather than total dependence on the government is a moral victory for me.

The battle lines are drawn so ferociously that I despair of any real progress in the foreseeable future. Mitch McConnel’s ultimate threat to scare Republicans into following his lead is: he’ll reach out to Democrats otherwise. That’s nauseating.

What bothers me the most is watching all this energy going into a war over coverage when the real problem is cost. Republicans and Democrats keep pushing the same familiar “solutions” without analyzing the problem.

The U.S. leads the world in health care research and cancer treatment… [But we have] fewer physicians per person than in most other OECD* countries… and the average American lives 78.7 years [2010 data], more than one year below the OECD average of 79.8 years…

The U.S. spent $8,233 on health per person in 2010. Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland are the next highest spenders, but in the same year, they all spent at least $3,000 less per person. The average spending on health care among the other 33 developed OECD countries was $3,268 per person.

* Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — an international economic group comprised of 34 member nations. pbs.org

Surely we can do as well as the rest of the OECD world.

BTW – the fivethirtyeight article says that the [Lyndon Baynes] “Johnson administration used Medicaid and Medicare to force the integration of segregated Southern hospitals.” Note the word “force.” Fascinating. We continue to suffer from America’s Original Sin.