Posted on 12/26/2024 10:03:17 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
America needs a working marketplace where patients are the primary customers.
Consider this: Health insurance is a product so terrible that few Americans voluntarily buy it without receiving a sizable subsidy.
“No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote this month. “It’s a patchwork built over decades.”
Today, insurers are accused of pushing up prices for medical care and then denying legitimate claims. Their leaders are said to be greedy or incompetent. In reality, we have a more fundamental problem: Health insurance can no longer pay for or manage modern health care, and the patchwork that Witty described is not fixable. It makes no sense to try.
Instead, Americans need to begin to create a working health-care marketplace that better aligns the incentives of health-care providers with the rapidly changing needs of patients.
Health insurance was meant to work like other kinds of insurance: When policyholders got sick, they would use the collective financial resources of the healthy to cover their costs. But this model was designed to pay for emergencies such as hospitalizations — not to “share the risk” of erectile dysfunction, weight loss, lifelong management of chronic conditions, or the mental health treatment needed by 1 in 5 Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 90 percent of America’s health-care expenditure goes toward chronic and mental health conditions.
It’s as if homeowners’ policies expanded from insuring against fires and floods to also covering utility bills and property taxes, or even replacing worn-out furniture.
Yes, some people become extraordinarily ill during their lives. But all of us, even the relatively healthy, now use a lot of health care. It’s no longer an unexpected need — an insurable risk. It has...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
But I do like the endless insurance commercials they peddle on TV. Like Flo handing out pretty gift packages to the dunces portraying their clients. They hand over big money for insurance and Flo hands the homos these empty gift packages..
It’s was brilliant marketing strategy directed at those drooling in cups.
Not true. I haven’t had insurance for 25 years.
My providers have cash up front discounts. I also shop around.
I also would love to have have a barebones high deductible hospitalization or catastrophic plan, but they don’t exist anymore.
We didn't have a car when I was growing up in the 50's. Our doctor's office was out of town, so he would come to the house to treat us. I think he charged $2.00 for the house call back then.
While much more complex, there are similarities between this problem and the problem of grossly inflated college tuition. Third party money removes incentives for those providing the service to control or reduce costs. It was also third party money that caused the mortgage crisis a few years ago (after Barney Frank and Company set the table).
If all of these markets had to price their products according to what their customers could afford out-of-pocket, pricing would be much different. As a society in general, we’ve got to ween ourselves off of dependence upon credit and other forms of third party funding.
liberal states forced insurance companies to cover things they didn’t want to cover and the federal government under obama said no one could be denied even with a pre existing condition. What did idiots think was going to happen?
the same thing happened when government got involved with the cost of college.
Yes, government interference is a large part of this.
As soon as government stuxk its thumb in the pie, the whole system went dirty.
Take government out and allow competition to thrive. Prices will start to decline.
Now I have no idea if a reasonable cost for the tests based on labor, supplies, office overhead and reasonable profit is $75 or $1500, but a 20x difference is ridiculous.
When you’re paying through health insurance, neither the doctor nor the patient care about costs as much. You’re both spending money from a 3rd party.
Conceptually, health care is cheap when you can’t do anything. When all we knew how to do was ‘set a broken leg’ there isn’t much cost to share. As we learn more and more about biology the more we have the ability to fix things, so shared costs can only go up.
Compounding this, include the (malpractice) insurance that medical businesses have to take out, that cost gets passed along.
I’m not for national health care, like the British NHS, but I do believe there must be a better way. Maybe AI can be a game changer(?).
Indeed. The hairball of corrupt political requirements is supported maintained by the shell-game of "third-party money." and much of that third-party money is simply printed, fiat money and government debt.
Milton Friedman had a lot to say about that.
https://www.financialsamurai.com/the-four-different-ways-to-spend-money-by-milton-friedman/
The Four Different Ways To Spend Money
1) You can spend your own money on yourself.
2) You can spend your own money on someone else.
3) You can spend somebody else's money on yourself.
4) You can spend somebody else's money on somebody else.
This is the easiest problem to fix:
ALL non military Public Employee’s in the United States, Shall enroll in the Affordable Care Act at their own expense for their primary medical care.
Watch how fast they ABOLISH Obamacare and come up with something better.
My Hospital Bill with Insurance was $13,000
Without Insurance it was $2500 out the door.
15 USC 1, read it sometime.
Right. Medicare lit the fuse of medical care inflation.
Nice try. But you lose. Go to the back of the line.
“fifteen dollars for a dental cleaning”
$80 in today’s money. About what my dentist charges.
My wife recently returned from a visit to S Africa. While there she needed treatment for dehydration due illness.
Went to a clinic (no waiting)—needed two IVs. Was attended to by a Dr.
Total fee was two hundred in US dollars. Being very familiar with typical fees in US as of late I can say equivalent charge in US would have been north of two thousand plus and a long wait in emergency care.
Your point is well taken and largely correct, in part; however, fedzilla indirectly got its fingers in the pie before that.
During WWII the Roosevelt admin capped wages so industrialists trying to grow their companies to service wartime contracts couldn't attract skilled workers by outbidding the wages offered by competitors. Consequently they had to offer additional benefits, one of the primary of which was health insurance. After that time, employer provided benefits came to be viewed more and more as "right," which of course became a prevailing attitude which government was more than happy to exploit.
I am aware of that, and what it means is that health care costs would have been far less than 5% in 1960 had government not already stuck its finger in the pie.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.