The current healthcare system sucks, but it is still MUCH better than Canadian/Euro style socialized medicine, which is evil.
I miss the pre-insurance days when we went to the Dr. and then paid him. Gee, what a concept.
Obamacare will do solve the problem of infections picked up in hospitals. It will probably make them even more common.
Our healthcare system does have flaws, LARGELY due to lawyers and insurance companies.
The benchmark still remains - MORE people come to AMERICA for their healthcare, than go to Canada, the UK, Cuba or anywhere else for healthcare.
Interesting read. A democrat I could sit down with over a brewski or two and have a meaningful meeting of the minds.
Best damn single article on the problem I have ever read.
It hits all the salient points. I can’t believe The Atlantic printed it.
This guy’s proposed solution is pretty close to mine. Cat insurance and MSAs. I would have different aspects around those two components - but IMO the only way to get control of the situation is to take that approach. But that cuts government AND the insurance companies out of controlling the system.
Health care is not a one-size fits all business. Good health care is as individual as each and every person who requires it. It is also sought for as many reasons as there are those who seek it — the advanced age person who is in the final stages of a life threatening disease (not necessarily cancer, as it metastasizes more slowly the older the victim is [I actually had a grandmother who outlived skin cancers on her body]), but there are those who seek to delay the inevitable at any cost. I, for one, do not see the good judgment in doing orthopedic surgery on those who are about to succumb to a disease with a more urgent timetable, but there are others who must accomplish something before it happens and it is, therefore, incumbent upon health care to do what it can. Those who will suffer under government-mandated procedures and insurance profitability guidelines will always be those who need it the most. The rest of us will carry on without a thought to it, paying premiums and enjoying very little benefit — UNTIL we require it ourselves. The federal government approach is destined to fail as it cannot, by its very nature, be responsive to the needs of the individual. That’s the bottom line, folks.
I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis."
He was doing fine until the "our collective search" and "has distracted us" parts. Clearly, the Democrats are doing all they can to rush a political overthrow of free enterprise hidden under a gauze of medical necessity.
Sigh. One of the things we need to get back to is the rules that Lister came up with in the beginning of the “antiseptic era”. Hospitals that look like hospitals not hotels ( a lot of this is patient driven they don’t LIKE that “sterile” atmosphere). That means painter walls, tile floors, plastic or stainless steel surfaces, no carpeting, drapes, paintings etc. Surfaces that can be steamed or scrubbed CLEAN. Nurses and doctors wearing white uniforms, bed linen that cam be cleaned at high temperature or steamed. An obsession with cleanliness. It worked before, it can work again.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the only thing worse would be more government involvement.
[L]et’s imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let’s add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn’t cover even five months of our health-care expenses.
Somebody else always seems to be paying for at least part of our health care. But that’s just an illusion."
My daughter was prescribed an antibiotic yesterday, two pills a day, for 10 days. The insurance company refused to pay for more than six pills in 22 days...
I think Goldhill nailed it.
For years I’ve been screeching to anyone who can bear to listen how the doctor’s office is the only business I patronize that asks me for payment BEFORE I get the product or service and CAN’T OR WON’T TELL ME HOW MUCH THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE COSTS. They’ll tell me my co-pay ( and get that wrong half the time ), but I cannot find out how much an office visit costs.
The hospital his father died in has an obvious problem -- so rail against that hospital, not against the system.
As someone who's been caregiver to two family members in their final days, and who now has a sibling undergoing chemo for a rare form of lukemia -- a treatment, due to age, that most likely won't be covered under the health care bill -- all I can say is that every patient needs an advocate. If the conditions, the service, the sanitary conditions in a hospital or by hospice at-home services are sub-standard, make a stink! Do something! Spend some money to get the patient out of sub-standard conditions. But, of all things, don't sit back on your heels and watch someone die, then bemoan the situation you did nothing to fight when it would have mattered.
The idea the government can improve on any of these sub-standard situations is ludicrous. Just go and sit in any inner-city clinic that services Medicare and Medicaid patients for hours on end, and get a clue -- this is what government-run health care will get you, and once implemented, advocacy of family or friends will be unheard and ignored by the bureaucrats.
One more thought -- read the House health care bill. The emphasis, over and over again, is on cost and efficiency, not quality. And this is only the framework from which the actual nuts and bolts of national health care will be written, in private, by a non-elected commission making life and death decisions for us all.
So he's saying, if I understand him, that having a free-market for most of us, and for governments to directly pay hospitals for care of the indigent -- fraud and the costs of fraud containment notwithstanding -- would be cheaper and better for most of our society.
"How would the health-care reform that’s now taking shape solve these core problems? The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of 'comprehensive' reform will not address the underlying issues.... Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound—and then build that edifice higher."