Everyone keeps explaining to me how wonderful and necessary OT/PT is, but no one is explaining how we can pay for it. In medicine, there is something called Triage. You deal with the life-threatening stuff first. Nothing in PT/OT is life-threatening. Neither is ED treatment or a host of other things that have been piled on top of Medicare over the years because we had the prosperity to pay for it.
Those days are gone. The workforce is shrinking and the non-productive portion of society is growing. People expect health care in their final years that exceeds their total lifetime income and no one is allowed to question it. Then, they shelter their wealth through clever trusts to keep Medicare from recouping any of the losses. How do we expect to save this country with that level of selfishness coded into our system?
You are buying into the collectivism meme.
If medical care was simply available on an out-of-pocket, fee-for-service basis, we might have a multi-tiered system, where the advanced tech/medicines were available to those who could afford them. With privately available insurance, more people might have access. If religious charities were not being coerced to give up their ideals, they would still be a source of care for the less fortunate.
We are giving control to a single-payer and the decisions are now collective. So: no PT/OT or dysfunction treatment to anyone because they aren’t *vital*. As decided by whom? The same geniuses who want to collectivize medicine are responsible for the shrinking workforce through outsourcing, aborting the next generation of workers, not allowing private capitalization for new industries and dumbing down the general academic and technological training available by demanding that everyone get an A and be certified in the name of fairness, while limiting the number of places available for that same training because education is also being centrally controlled.
Rehabilitative medicine serves a collective good: people become functional again and therefore become contributing members of society. Resources are not tied up providing maintenance care to the injured. How would it serve some greater good to just let people remain immobile and dependent? Of course, you could argue that jobs are created for attendants. Immobile, depressed, dependent people die sooner of complications. Is this a greater good, as it decreases the pool of people competing for scarce medical resources? It is just euthanasia, via triage. Triage is relevant in emergency situations and on the battlefield. It is criminal when applied to the general population in non-emergency situations.
We have had rehabilitative medicine for a long time. PT evolved out of treating bayonet wounds from WWI. OT split off from PT after the polio epidemic, when people who were now mobile needed to relearn how to take care of themselves.
As for ED treatment:every culture has tons of folk medicine aimed at restoring sexual potency. A simple drug is cheaper and more effective, w/less side effects than rhino horn and more socially acceptable than sleeping with multiple virgins. People denied sexual function become psychologically warped. But, so what, as long as the collective is not paying for it.
If we stop the idea of a limited medical resource pie paid from a pool coerced from everyone and administered by bureaucrats, the medical advancements would either be utilized or not by those who decided for themselves what they needed. It is the same people who promised everyone the best of medical care who are forcing them now to pay more for it in the form of taxes.
As an MT, my husband will likely be out of practice if his modality becomes subsumed under some National Health. The untrained administrators will decide who gets treatment and also what that treatment will be, how long it will be provided and what pittance the provider will be allowed. When all of medicine becomes unionized, that power will be complicated by the providers simply refusing to practice.
Eventually, no one will receive anything much in the way of care, as no one will be left to provide it. The *right* to medical care will be another moot right and be replaced by the privilege of care for the politically correct. This assumes there will be providers, technology and pharmaceuticals available even to them. Right now, we have governmentally-facilitated shortages in all those areas.
We had a wonderful medical system that advanced human well-being and was available to all. It was possible to provide the very best even to the indigent as some providers were subsidized by private means to do so via charities, usually religious ones. Now, having decided that there must be some mythical equality of care paid for collectively and administered by non-competent political appointees, we are losing one modality, one treatment, one drug at a time.
I wonder how people will feel when the treatment they need is not available when they need it? I already hear people moaning that home health care for the elderly or the disabled isn’t free. It seems that the collective is in favor of slavery and tyranny as long as they personally pay nothing. The truth is, of course, they pay as much as can be extorted from them, while receiving a minimum.
Analogous to this is that veterinary medicine is dependent upon human medical technology and treatments. Limit the entire field as is being accomplished and there will be no treatment for any animal, from pets to food animals.
Now, just which ideology is in favor of those outcomes? The one that triumphed in the same places that decided to use *barefoot doctors*.
Blaming the elderly, who were promised medical care in exchange for a lifetime of taxes, is just a blame-game. Retirees pay for Medicare, pay for supplemental insurance policies and pay co-pays. It is a goal of the controllers to end all inheritance. Anyone who can protect their life savings, while still paying for their insurance and their care, is not necessarily selfish. They are trying to insure that they will be left with something on which to live, as well as to pass on to their descendants.
It is the system as it is being forced upon us that creates all of these situations.