Posted on 03/18/2017 7:21:28 AM PDT by NYer
SNIP
As a result of this thinking, most of us have become part of a large system that is so complex that we don’t have any idea how much something costs or why it costs that much—and often don’t even bother to ask! So many things occur to me to ask, but there are few good answers. Should an ankle x-ray cost $700? Why? I know the machine is initially expensive, but so is my car. After driving my car for ten years, the three years of payments are a distant memory. Surely after the 10,000th x-ray the machine should be paid for!
And why do we expect our health insurance to pay for every little thing? I don’t expect my auto insurance to pay for the cost of new tires or an oil change. Medical insurance used to be to protect against financial ruin in the event of catastrophic expenses. Now it covers the annual check-up and even the most elective of drugs such as Viagra. Why?
Obviously we consumers are part of the problem. We can’t just pin this all on insurance companies or “big pharma.” We now expect the smallest incidental expenses to be covered. Further, we sue doctors and hospitals over a tiny scar or a minor oversight. We can barely abide the least inconvenience or suffering related to our health.
I suspect that part of the problem is that we have handed everything over to someone else to pay; as a result, we don’t consider the shared cost we are all now carrying. It’s all just too remote to us. Having now removed most of the economic impact, cost is no longer a consideration. Someone else is paying; who cares what it costs? Just try to pay cash for an x-ray
(Excerpt) Read more at ncregister.com ...
How Has Our Health Care System Become Such a Mess?
Someone profits greatly either directly or indirectly.
Like PP (abortion) ..why do they require the government if
people, leftist, believve in it so strongly?
Overall healthcare costs are also a mess—largely driven by our insurance catastrophe.
And just to be clear, I would probably never had accepted this in my earlier adult years when I felt immortal. As a healthy 63 year old, my perspective has, well, matured.
To live is Christ and to die is gain. — The apostle Paul
I suspect that part of the problem is that we have handed everything over to someone else to pay.
That’s not “part of the problem” at all. It IS the problem, as I’ve been saying for years.
Do you want to make something expensive? Just make sure the person using it is not the person paying for it. And yes, I’ve been saying it since 1980 - when I went to my first town council meeting and this issue came up.
The article is a good one, but I have one bone to pick with the author. Since he is a Catholic priest, it would have been good for him to mention the complicity of Catholic hospitals in this whole mess. I believe every one of them in my area has sold out to secular partners who are firmly entrenched in the country’s health care mess.
Exactly correct!
Government and mainly the Democrats.
The solution is to outlaw health insurance. Force the free market upon healthcare. Make hospitals and doctors set their fees at what the market dictates people can afford. Those who can’t pay get treated anyway and get billed afterwards. Then they can make payments. Some accounts will go unpaid and this can be built into the fee structure. People will only go for treatment when they truly need it.
Broken finger, 8 stitches, no reset of bone, no operation. A couple X-rays.
Total billing? $6,000
The fallback position to outlawing health insurance is to only allow catastrophic insurance that only kicks in above a certain dollar amount... Say $750.
Notice how every religious organization has become secular/globalist?
If my God is an angry God, boy is he pissed right now.
A good start would be to reorg the FDA. It has become a bureaucracy that fully caters to big pharma lobbyists. Not safety or the best interests of the people.
First thing that should happen is to fast track approval of foreign drugs that show adequate safety and copyright compliance. For example if China, Canada, Israel, India or any other country can make Sildenafil Citrate pills for $1 each, there is no reason for the FDA to perpetuate Pfizer’s price fixing racket of selling them at $100 each.
The same can be said of the thousands of other life saving drugs that are handled the same way.
There are numerous reasons.
The prolawyer legal system is one
The desire to provide medical treatment for the poor but no facilities other than emergency rooms.
Regulation compliance mandates that made small medical practices un competitive
How Has Our Health Care System Become Such a Mess?
The government started messing with it!!
When I was a child (way back in the 50’s), we went to our doctor, my parents paid him, case closed. No insurance involved! He even gave us pills when needed — no need to go to the drug store.
Sorry, but you are advocating the same thing that started this mess.
Cash only, funding for the poor from charity.
Never happen of course, until society is destroyed by our economic socialist bubble.
And no worry there, clearly we are nearing the end times.
If payback is a bitch, modern society has a whopper coming.
You also live in bargain flyover country. I use a Christian healthcare ministry that was grandfathered into Obamacare and is about to have its protection wiped out in Obamacare 2.0—but they use your method, and cost savings, to keep higher costs reasonable. So there is something to what you say. But there are also those who were bankrupted by a few days hospital stay, and they are at the mercy of the hospital determining their billing fate. Some hospitals still essentially pick up the bills of the essentially indigent, but many wipe people out.
The only priorities Congress has are 1) Keeping the insurance industry as a partner in whatever they design, and 2) Maintaining level, or increasing, the number of Federal employees required to implement whatever they design.
In order to “cover everybody” and “reduce costs” (and “costs” mean many different things in this context), while preserving electability of the design crew - I hate to say it, but single payer with a robust private option is the only way out.
He was turned over by His own people to be crucified. It doesn't get any more secularized than that, does it?
It should be difficult to say people have a God-given right to an entitlement that is worth about 18 percent of U.S. GDP, or about $10,000 per person. (Actual spending would differ tremendously among people depending on their health. This figure is the average spent on people or what an insurance policy covering all expenditures would cost.)
Such an entitlement would equal global GDP per capita. Such an entitlement would mean there is no money for food, clothing, housing and basic education, or anything else. So, God has not provided the resources necessary for this entitlement.
Maybe God discriminates on the basis of nationality. Americans have a God-given right to health care costing costing $10,000 per person, but not people in Colombia. I doubt it.
One of the things the good father is saying is that there is no God-given right to anything like the average expenditure on health care in the U.S. But, maybe there is a right - in the sense of a Christian duty whether fulfilled through the state apparatus or through private charity - to some level of health care, perhaps varying a bit according to time and place.
For the poor, we in America call this level of medical care “Medicaid.” People who want more than that level, who can afford it, can buy more. Perhaps, if we followed this principle … everybody starts off with Medicaid and those who want more, and can afford it, can buy more … then we can not only fulfill our Christian duty, but also attack whatever it is that is driving the cost of private health care through the roof.
There are two problems with this thinking:
(1) Medicaid is not a lower level of health care. Medicaid people get the same level of medical care as anybody else. Even more, considering that many in the working class cannot afford health care premiums (even with the subsidies) and cannot afford the out-of-pocket expenses.
We have a perverted system where the poor get health care for free, the upper middle class and rich can afford to pay, and the working class is stiffed. It is immoral. Only ignorant people can pretend it is Christian, because it punishes those who work, who marry and who try to raise their children, and reward people who don’t work, who don’t marry, and who abandon their children.
(2) Medicaid only APPEARS to pay for the medical care of the people it covers. In fact, it UNDER-reimburses health care providers, who are expected to OVER-charge those who use private insurance. That is, Medicaid is largely financed on cross-subsidies. Few people know this. Among the people who don’t, is the good father, who thinks health care cooperatives are a solution to the problem. Health care cooperative are absolutely fine. But, were a lot of people to shift out of private insurance to health care cooperatives, the cross-subsidies needed for Medicaid from those remaining on private health insurance would have to be even greater.
(I should say a few things about Medicare: Medicare is an earned entitlement. People pay into the system when they work, and should be able to draw out of it when they qualify for benefits. Nowadays, you can either remain in “traditional” Medicare or use your Medicare dollars to buy qualifying private insurance. I like the choice.)
So, what I conclude from what the good father says, is that we should reconsider what is included in the benefit package that is called Medicaid, so it is affordable to the taxpayer; and, maybe also we should reconsider what is included in the required coverage of private health insurance so working-class families can afford it. Our Christian duty doesn’t mean we provide the same health care to everybody. It means we have a moral obligation to provide a level of health care consisted with human dignity to those who cannot afford to do this for themselves.
Pick your bone with the courts, the politicians, and the insurance companies blackmailing them into participating.
It’s not like they’re protected by the conscience clause anymore.
Maybe. But I always note that Mother Teresa probably didn’t even know what medical insurance was.
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