Posted on 05/02/2002 7:42:08 AM PDT by Aeronaut
Regards,
First benefit: about 20% of the cost of health care is the administrative cost of performing all of the billing and accounting procedures needed to satisfy Medicare and the thousands of insurance companies, all of which pay different amounts for every procedure.
Second benefit: The cost of what is being done for the patient again becomes a consideration. It isn't at this point in time.
The criminal Clintons aside, if you paid the health care premiums the way I have for the last 22 years, you would see that the escalation started long before those two swine arrived on the scene. It can be traced all the way back to the first government intrusion in health care. I don't think I have a dull eye.
I wondered how long it would take to turn the subject to the author instead of what he wrote.
Third party payers are surely part of the problem, but isn't it easy to use more government force, as you are proposing, to "fix" the problem rather than stopping the circle of force?
In this scenerio, you would replace the people who force others to their solution, with yourself. To use force to make them use your solution.
Government caused the problem, it is not the remedy.
Not difficult to believe at all. In 1930, heath care was even cheaper . In 1900, it was cheaper still. In 1800, it was hardly a consideration.
Government intervention is a huge part of the problem of couse but blaming the cost solely on that is a simplistic analysis.
In 1950, you could not buy a pacemaker, a hip replacement, a CAT scan, Lipitor or a bovine heart valve replacement no matter how much money you had.
Government should get out of the market but that will never make the care some people may need affordable. We're going to have to accept that there can be no equality in health care anymore than there can in transportation. Some can buy a modest car, others a Lexus,others a Ferrari and some travel on private jets.
Just the handful of sell-outs at the top of each organization, be it a hospital, HMO, corporation, etc.
Briefly, there's a triumvirate of organizations who maintain the status quo.
1.) Insurers like to keep the bills nice and high, so as to keep their percentage cut large.
2.) Hospitals like to keep the bills nice and high, so as to keep facility fees huge. (My old hospital would charge Medicaid or an insurance company $3000 for a one-night stay in the hospital for a tonsillectomy patient. When the cash-paying plastic surgery patients and their surgeons needed THE SAME exact service, the quote they got from the hospital was $300!!--ONE TENTH!! That will give you some idea of the REAL price of a night's stay in the hospital. It's high but not crazy high.)
3.) Third, the Federal and State governments like to keep the bills nice and high, because it justifies tons and tons of administrative spending, posturing, and gives them ammo to keep the voters in a low-grade panic about the future of health care. (Guess which party traditionally benefits from such panic-mongering.)It also gives them a huge pool of lobby-dollars from the other two oligarchs in the triumvirate. It's all very corrupt, you see.
The solution to all this is not banning health insurance, rather, free health insurance, with the natural outcome being Medical Savings Accounts, and high deductibles: These lead straight to low premiums, and also lower routine costs.
Health care could easily cost one third of what it costs now, with huge incentives possible for joggers and other health-conscious persons. Nothing like that is being explored under the current cartel system, I wonder why.
Just let the market do its thing.
Oh yeah, this just in... Congress is trying to stamp out the overwhelmingly-popular Medical Savings Accounts, which have heretofore been allowed to only a handful (less than a million) citizens on a "trial basis".
Why do you think the triumvirate is so threatened by MSAs?
Not too hard to figure out.
When it comes to medicine, there are few Americans who are not radical equalitarians. If that rich guy over there can afford a triple by-pass or a heart transplant, I darn well should be able to afford one too is the thinking
The problem is there is no possible way, even if we had a free market, for everyone or even a large segment of the population to afford all the high tech care available. And that means people will demand more and more government intervention. You and I will be taxed so people who cannot pay for a half a million dollar operation get one.
This is where the Libertarian Party always fails. The LP dogma goes nowhere when a society's deeply held moral convictions, in this case equal access to medical care, are in opposition to it.
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