">Posted on 11/30/2015 7:23:50 AM PST by all the best
The left will tell you we need more government involvement in healthcare. What they don’t realize is that increased regulation and government involvement are exactly what caused healthcare costs to rise dramatically over the past 30 years.
There are several reasons why government-run healthcare is a disaster. Economist explain how the government subsidized third party payer system separates consumers from prices and how such a system kills competition.
But there is an even more immediate effect– the booming costs of administering a system of complex regulations. Government healthcare necessitates armies of bureaucrats. Take Medicare, for instance: not only does every doctor’s office, hospital, and clinic need to have specialists trained to navigate the complex regulations and billing procedures, but the government must also hire bureaucrats to review that information.
For every series of regulations comes more and more bureaucrats. It has gotten to the point where our healthcare costs are going almost entirely to bureaucrats and not medical professionals.
Take a look at this chart and the mystery of medical costs rising becomes explainable. It also becomes clear that more government is the last thing we need.">
(Excerpt) Read more at thelibertarianrepublic.com ...
Much the same as public schools or every government agency for that matter.
Healthcare is no different than anything else.
The more government involvement you have, the more expensive it gets.
One pic (graphic) worth a thousand words.
It would be interesting to see a similar plot for faculty and administrators at universities.
Among other things, anytime any student faction get its collective panties in a wad over some supposed injustice (currently - bathroom designations), the immediate response of those in charge is usually to institute some new office (”Office of Transgendered Affairs”), and then to appoint a dean, an associate dean, and two assistant deans (each with their own secretary) to deal with the issue.
Pelosi was orgasmic at the O/Care signing. (Ut, oh. Harry's hands are not visible.)
The Obamacare atrocity was a cunning vehicle for
consolidating Dummycrat power. Dems cashed-in bigtime.
(A) Michelle's buddy---botched the billion dollar web site rollout---still doesn't work.
(B) Harry Reid's $4 billion "accidental" payment to Landrieu is a clue to how the straight party-line vote got this atrocity passed.
(C) A multi-billion dollar slush fund---the Untraceable $8 Billion ObamaCare PR Budget---truly govt fraud at its finest.
Egged on by Pelosi, no one in Congress told Americans about Section 4002---which mandates an $8B untraceable fund to "promote" Obamacare (apparently b/c Boobamba had so little confidence in his signature legislation).
In 2010 Taxpayers are extorted $500 million, in 2011, $750 million, 2012, $1 billion, 2013, $1.25 billion, 2014, $1.5 billion and in 2015 and on, $2 billion........
BUMP
Well there’s yer problem!
The public employee unions have argued for years that we need single payer because we wouldn’t have to pay those high private insurance executive salaries. They want those high salaries themselves, along with taxpayer backed pensions.
That’s really not the only problem.
Bureaucracy is always expensive.
My former employer once hired a firm to study our timesheet system and projects and put a price on them. It turned out to cost more to track hours than the total cost benefit to any project.
We abandoned filling out timesheets, because it was a waste of money.
I wish my current employer would do this too.
After getting kicked of my insurance plan for the second time in 12 months (I belonged to one of those bankrupt state co-ops), I know need to find another plan. I am expecting to be totally raped by the few crony-capitalist health insurers still playing the Obamacare game.
Now I am finding that health insurance is being sold by financial brokers - I’m attending a seminar today.
Just another useless layer in our extremely complex, government-run, fascist health care system.
You don't buy your car insurance from your boss... or homeowners insurance... why should you buy health insurance?
This took the marketplace out of the equation.
And worse was ‘co-pays’. No matter where you go, or what they charge, you only pay the same price- your ‘co-pay’
So why bother to shop around?
I had a babysitter who needed to go see a doctor for a bad scratch (literally, just a scratch) that had gotten a little red and infected.
The Doctor walked in, took a look, and walked out telling the nurse what to prescribe. He was in the room for less than 10 seconds. He charged $400. When I called to help her out (and complain) they said it was not the length of time but the QUALITY of the service...
Then, when she went to get her anti-biotic they filled her prescription with some brand name drug- and wanted to charge her ANOTHER $400. When I told them she had no insurance, they re-filled the prescription with a generic drug (same thing- only generic brand) and charged $20.
Only in a screwed up system where you don't see the costs are they able to charge either $400 or $20 for the same thing.
And last but not least, is the endless government regulations that FORCE the insurance companies to cover things the government mandates they must cover.
For example, imagine you made a drug that allowed men to have sex... Do you think there might be a market for that? A BIG market? And maybe it would be possible to mass-produce it for pennies?
Or is it more profitable for them to get the government to tell insurance companies they MUST cover the cost of viagra, so they can sell it for $10 a pill.
When I worked for a public employee union I found that they believed that the people they represented, uneducated pencil pushers that enrolled people into MediCal, deserved more pay than the doctors. They had as much respect for the doctors as they did taxpayers, which is not much.
One of the stupidest things ever done was to require that physicians, or someone they hire, minutely classify everything the physician (and other health-care providers, e.g. nurse-practitioners, licensed psychologists) does in reports (called “claims”) sent to non-physician bureaucrats in order for the physician to be paid, and to have non-physicians second-guess physicians in deciding whether and how much to pay them for their services. Supposedly this “controls costs”, but actually it only controls payments to physicians, while creating needless costs in the form of administrative overhead.
Naturally, Obamacare made this aspect of health-care provision even worse, by requiring everyone to use the even finer classification scheme provided by ICD-10, adding new costs for training all the bureaucrats and “medical billing professionals” — yes, that is the term — in the new classification scheme, which by its nature will waste even more time and cost even more to use than the old ICD-9 classification scheme.
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