If you are going to buy an insurance policy to cover every routine office visit, scratch, boo boo and pill, it’s going to be a very expensive policy for you.
>>If you are going to buy an insurance policy to cover every routine office visit, scratch, boo boo and pill, it’s going to be a very expensive policy for you.
That’s what copays are for. When you have to pay $25 for a band-aid after a scratch or a boo boo, then you’ll go buy a box of band-aids. As for pills, the Medical-Industrial Complex is the one that makes pills only dispensable by a doctor.
When I was in the Navy on subs, all my medical needs were taken care of by an Independent Duty Corpsman. If I go to see the equivalent in the civilian world, a PA or NP, I still pay the same as if I had seen a doctor.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not disagreeing with what you are saying about insurance. It should only cover big ticket problems. But the small stuff should not cost $150 for a simple office visit and close to $500 if the doctor has to actually do anything like lance a boil.
I understand that the theoretical economist who lives in his protected little “ceteris paribus” world will say that we have to make health care so expensive that people are dying before market forces will “fix” it (ceteris paribus, of course).
The system has to change, because a year without diabetes drugs while the market “fixes” itself (ceteris paribus) is a death sentence.