For this, you can thank health insurance.
Think about it: What if you had an insurance card for groceries. Go to the store, simply fill your grocery cart and check out using the card. Now be honest, what would keep everybody, including you, from buying anything and everything they wanted—expensive cuts of meats, high dollar foods—regardless of the cost? Why would it matter? Somebody else is paying for it. Eventually the price of everything would skyrocket, becoming too expensive for everyone.
This is the way our healthcare system works now. Everyone is buying all the healthcare they want, regardless of the cost. And why not? Somebody else is paying for it. (And what makes it worse is that the government is paying for the insurance card for a large number of those people).
“Go to the store, simply fill your grocery cart and check out using the card.”
They already have that. It’s called credit cards like VISA and Mastercard.
The reason medical care is so expensive is people take advantage of it for their separate gain. Lawyers are the biggest offenders. Someone gets hurt, your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault, and here comes some lawyer with a million dollar lawsuit of which the person could get maybe a third of it while the john law collects the rest. That is, if it makes it to court. Generally most are settled for far less and the only people getting screwed are the doctors. So the docs have to spend a lot on insurance and that is passed to the customer. I have a neurosurgeon friend here in the northwest that pays $90K annually just for malpractice insurance so if something happens, again whose fault(?), just basically trying to stay out of court. If you want to blame someone for perpetuating the problem, don’t look at the system. Look at those that created it and everyone else is forced to use the only game in town. Make sure you push the right buttons in the voting booth. The Affordable Care Act was created by politicians, not by doctors or patients. And the fed politicians don’t even use it as they have their own free healthcare system called the DC Health Link.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/18/politics/senate-health-care-benefits/index.html
And a lot of your tax dollars made it possible.
wy69
You left out the part where insurance companies are skimming obscene amounts off the top. Everybody wants to point the finger at illegals going to the emergency room but that’s a very small part of it. Look up who owns the most expensive penthouses in New York, they’re all insurance company executives. They’ve got the perfect scam, the public is mandated to buy your product and you can basically charge whatever you want. Obamacare was a massive giveaway to them. Follow the money and see who’s getting rich off of the incredible costs of healthcare today. It’s insurance companies. They get away with it because they own Congress. While everyone is blaming nurses making too much money insurance companies are robbing us blind.