Don't let this happen to you!
Posted on 08/20/2009 4:59:35 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A pregnant American arrives at her doctor's office. It's time for her ultrasound check. The doctor wheels over the machine from the corner of the room: Of course, he has his own.
A child has a fall from a slide. There's blood in his urine. The parents race him to the emergency room. Two hours later, the boy's having a CAT scan. (An American is twice as likely to use a CT machine in any given year as a Canadian, four times as likely as a Briton, and seven times as likely as a Dane.) A car driven by an illegal immigrant smashes into a tree. The driver and his family are horribly injured. They are raced to the nearest emergency room and treated, no questions asked, no bill presented.
That's American health care at its best. America at its worst, of course, you know. Or do you?
Europeans see the American health system as a brutal Darwinian struggle. The poor are abandoned, the sick must produce credit cards at hospital emergency rooms and government disavows responsibility for the health of the population.
But those are largely imaginary or exaggerated ailments. The hardest problems for Americans are not so much medical as financial. Insurance premiums have doubled in the past decade; and Medicare and Medicaid, the government health programs, are growing at a rate that cannot possibly continue. Tens of millions of people lack insurance. Yet they do not go uncared for. Rather they use the most expensive care, emergency care, and hospitals add the cost on to the bills of paying patients.
Almost all the problems of the U. S. health system trace back to a pair of unexpected ironies: profit-driven private insurance corporations find it much harder to say "no" than governments do...(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at canada.com ...
Don't let this happen to you!
I stopped reading once I saw the author is David Frumplepie.
There are several reasons health care is so expensive, and gets more so so quickly. One is the subsidization of those who cannot pay by those who do. Another is the huge magnification of the cost of drugs and medical devices caused by the FDA. But the single most important factor is simply the fact that insurance provides the funds needed to pay ever higher prices. If there were no insurance, prices would be much lower. They’d have to be: few could afford to pay current prices, lacking insurance.
Even a blind RINO finds an acorn once in awhile, I suppose.
Bump!
And ping.
Why can’t there be a tax credit to Drs and medical facililties that provide service to those who truly cannot afford care? Just list on their tax forms as a loss. Helps to balance the profits they make, therefore, lowering their taxes. Uh it was once done, why not now?
I suffered a heart attack last Dec. Symptoms were classic and my wife rushed me to the ER. Less than 2 hrs from the onset of symptoms, I was out of surgery with a stint in one artery.
I don't think it gets better than this. Might have died in on of those other countries.
It cost me a $250 copay.
Follow-up:
I have lost 26 pounds, am eating right and am up to jogging 3 miles per day. Feel great.
“But the single most important factor is simply the fact that insurance provides the funds needed to pay ever higher prices. If there were no insurance, prices would be much lower. They’d have to be: few could afford to pay current prices, lacking insurance.”
Kind of like the problem with government backed student loans. The universities know the money is there so up go the tuitions.
Insurance doesn’t cause rising costs. If it weren’t for insurance only the rich would have medical care at considerable higher prices. Ask the doctor who makes $300,000 and has to pay $200,000 of it for insurance. Rising costs are also caused by new drugs and instruments.
I don’t think many on Freerepublic need convincing, but check out some of the wait times in Ontario, Canada’s largest and wealthiest province.
http://www.health.gov.on.ca/transformation/wait_times/public/wt_public_mn.html#
some examples from Eastern Ontario including Ottawa, Capital City of socialist health care:
-MRI: 71 to 281 days (varies by hospital)
-CT scan: 13 to 139 days
-hip replacement: 139 to 390 days
-bypass surgery: 43 days
-cataract surgery: 90 to 143 days
Some Republicans like Mitch McConnell have publicized these numbers but i think every “public option” advocate should be challenged as to why gov’t health care in the USA will not end up with these results.
Because that would lessen government's control over the system. The cost is secondary, the primary goal is to have as much control as possible over as many facets of life in America as possible.
To put it simply, it makes too much sense and would be too effective. Government, bureaucrats and politicians need the failure and confusion plus the crisis atmosphere invented by the press.
It's a fact of life that the better things cost more. It should come as a surprise to no one that America has the best health care system in the world and it costs the most. When I was a kid my dad ran a gas station in a small Southern town. He had a sign on the wall that said, “We have no argument with those who charge less. We figure they know what they're product is worth.” That's how I see the cost of health care.
Your approach makes great sense and I'll bet docs would love it. But the pols don't want to solve the problem, they just want to benefit from it and provide yet another problem they can use to benefit from next time around.
I wish it was more taylor made and chose-driven. That’s about all I differ in how it should be.
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