A trillion dollar pony is hard to forget about. Especially when it comes time for us to buy a new pony, one that helps people
instead of killing them. Then suddenly we’re unable to afford it. How convenient.
Lack of response noted.
So, you have no evidence of the demand for unlimited health care, right? I assure you, people who are sick want to stop being sick as quickly as possible. I’m unaware of anyone who likes to be in a hospital. Plus, people can demand anything, but they don’t order themselves operations or drugs - doctors do.
So, try again to answer the question, or admit that you are wrong.
No, I don’t want you to buy me a Mercedes…but I do want to be able to AFFORD decent health care. Is that really so hard for you to understand?!
And I suppose your insurance is paid solely by you?! Your employer isn’t paying a nickel? If so, PLEASE tell me where I can purchase that cheap policy.
Really? So insurance premiums are all profit. Why doesn’t competition drive down the price?
Why does a company like Wellpoint Health make a profit of 3% of premiums? That doesn’t sound like your 100% above.
Wellpoint says 80%+ of their premiums go to pay for CARE, ie doctor visits, hospital stays, million dollar neonatal care, etc. Who pays for that in your case? No one?
It’s like the people who complain about their car insurance being $1000 a year. “But I’ve never even been in an accident! They’re ripping me off! It’s pure PROFIT”.
Is it? YOU’VE never been in an accident but you’re in a pool with people who also pay $1000 and cost the company 100x that when they have an accident.
Well what you call “decent health care” is a very expensive thing. They have to insure you against the worst, highest cost outcomes…you need a liver transplant, you need $100K of surgery after a car accident, etc. You get cancer and need a half million dollars of surgeries, drugs, etc. YOu have a child premature who spends his first month in an incubator at a cost of $250K.
Diseases which would have killed you 20 years ago (at a cost of nothing to the insurance company) are now curable at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the insurance company. Good for you for being cured. But someone has to pay. Doctors don’t work for free.
I want a reasonably priced Ferrari. I’m willing to pay $2,500. Why can’t I get one! The gov’t needs to provide Ferrari insurance.
Of course people want to get better. They want to get better by any means necessary, whatever it costs (as long as it costs them nothing). They have no incentive to ever say “that cure is costing $200K per month and will keep me alive for another 3 months…naah it’s not worth it.”
Doctors prescribe stuff, not patients? What difference does that make? Doctors want to do everything possible to help their patients. And they’re not paying for it so that isn’t their concern. In fact, the more stuff they prescribe, the more their salaries increase, in some cases.
Any time you provide a service which improves someone’s life (and that’s not hard to do when people are very old and afflicted with diseases of old age) and there is no cost to it…the demand is there. In the 1970s Medicare was predicted to cost $10B in 1990. Actual cost $100B. Just off by a factor of 10 or so.
Providing free, unlimited health care to everyone will just increase costs all the more. It’s only in fantasy land where you can make statements like “health care is a right!”. Sounds nice, but who pays for this right?
What if, at the end of everyone’s life they could be injected with very expensive drugs which would have them live another 3 months at a cost of $1M? Would you do it? “Of course! The gov’t should pay for it! No one should die from lack of money!”. So that’s $2T per year…it just doesn’t work. And eventually with stem cells and all the other miracle cures, that will become a reality.
So health insurers break people’s knee caps when they don’t pay up? If patients and doctors had a relationship before insurance companies, then why do you need them at all? It’s a free country, don’t buy their insurance if you don’t like it.
It isn’t like the Mafia at all. It’s a voluntary arrangement. It’s insurance.
Is car insurance like the mafia? I’ve paid probably $20K and never used them ONCE in 20 years of driving. How is that fair? They should give me my money back!
My dad has death insurance (life insurance) and he has to pay every month…and get this, he’s NEVER used it!! NEVER!! How is that fair?
Are you being willfully obtuse? You pay every month and if you get sick they pay for you…if they get such a bad reputation for not paying claims noone would use them. Usually they specificy if you use this network and see these doctors they will pay for whatever the doctor recommends.
The costs they pay are often FAR in excess of the premiums you pay. Like most insurance, most of the people collect FAR LESS than they pay in. A few people collect FAR MORE.
It’s not complicated.
Where does the money go anyway? Insurance companies have pretty small profit margins.
Really? I hadn’t noticed.
So, am I to assume you pay 100% of your premium? No employer is kicking in any extra funds? You are just paying for this from your family trust fund?
No, I am single and pay about $100 a month for it. My company pays the rest, I Think about $300 or so.
Just saying. I know it’s frustrating but it’s not really a conspiracy.
It would be good if companies could offer a bare bones plan to just cover basic treatments, broken legs, etc…but I don’t think they are allowed to do that.
Demonstrably untrue because of that table you posted? A table on some blog spot from nowhere? A table, that for all we know, you typed up yourself? You have got to be kidding. Please tell me you are kidding.
Now Shodan, don’t get me wrong. I know nothing of healthcare profit margins, but surely you’ve been around here long enough to know you should do better than that. I know this isn’t GD, but c’mon!
Why don’t you give some data on the prevalence of this problem. After all, insurance companies pay today also. But it is a nice little false dilemma. Pay this, and government is wasting our money. Don’t pay it, and government runs death panels.
There are plenty of people with 3 months to live who prefer not to spend a good bit of their last moments in the hospital, by the way. Which refutes your contention that everyone wants infinite health care.
Doctors being paid based on the number of services the recommend is an excellent way of reducing health care costs, as the New Yorker article pointed out. Our present system hasn’t done a great job with this problem, has it? Why do you think it would get worse if government pays? In any case, do you object to doctors helping their patients? Do you object to expensive but effective remedies? They are not helping by specifying expensive and unhelpful remedies, plus I think this is unethical. Are you claiming most doctors are unethical?
Cite? Was inflation factored in? There is of course a cost to Medicare, not to mention what people paid when they were working. But I’m confused. Do you think it is wrong for someone who is old to want to get treated? At what age should we cut them off? My father-in-law had some surgery and stuff done 10 years ago, but he is still going strong and writing music at 93. Should he not have done it since there was some reasonably good chance he wouldn’t have lived as long as he has?
Anyone who has reasonable private insurance gets what is effectively free, unlimited health care. I’m sure you are ready to give cites about how this has led to an explosion of wasteful and unnecessary care. (There is some, but demand from patients doesn’t have all that much to do with it - bad incentives for doctors is more like it.) You’ll also be able to show me how real free systems, like in England or Canada, are more wasteful than ours.
Well, it is nice to see that someone is in favor of death panels. Why don’t you try to address the real situation and stop making up absurd hypotheticals. It is pretty sad that the only defense of your opinion you’ve got is a fairy tale.
You don’t really understand what insurance is, do you?
So what is your overall point? Government should provide any and all health care for people who don’t get it “free” through their insurance and it won’t cost hardly anything because it’s the moral thing to do and doing moral things is always free?
Paying doctors on services provided is a way of controlling health care? Then why did Obama say he wants to pay more for a fee for diagnosis instead of fee for service? Fee for service gives doctors an incentive to provide more and more services. Not that they’re unethical, but if what you do is perform tests, you’re gonig to perform tests. See Atlantic article that describes two populations of Medicare reciepients, one of which has twice the cost of the other merely due to the concentration of doctors in their geographic area. Doctors create their own demand, apparently.
It isn’t an absurd hypothetical. It is the obvious trend of medicine. More and more cures and higher and higher costs. Why do YOU think medical costs have far outstripped inflation? Is it the “middlemen”?
More and more medicine is the incentive in place. Incentives for drug companies and equipment makers to find cures, incentives for doctors to provide them and incentives for patients to use them (as they are free). How could there be any question as to why health care costs keep increasing.
But you never stated what your point was other than that “health care demand isn’t infinite”. OK, but it seems like it’s rising fast enough to be pretty close…at least that’s what Obama keeps saying. Is he lying?
You haven’t noticed that medical costs have risen from 2% of GDP to 16% or so in the last 40 years and you’re giving pontificating lectures on a message board? Was it all just “inflation”? LOL.
So, all in all the insurance company gets almost $5K a year for your insurance. And you certainly get a better deal than a person buying insurance on his own because of your company’s bargaining power. I suspect you don’t have that big a deductible with that policy.
Now, consider someone making $30 K a year in a job where the company does not pay. He’d have to pay somewhat over 1/6th of his pre-tax income just for insurance. He’d probably get a cheaper policy with a big deductible, so that many years he’d be paying say $1500 and never see anything back from it. That’s even if he is healthy.
You deserve to not worry about health care. Why should he have to worry about it.
BTW, since I bet you have basically free medical care ($100 a month is chicken feed) I assume you are at the doctor’s nearly every week to make use of it. No? You actually have better things to do? Okay then, I’m sure that if you ever have a major health problem, you’ll gallantly tell the doctors to let you die to keep from cutting into the profits of your insurance company. I salute you, oh gallant one.
I understand insurance completely.
You and the OP can’t afford something so you demand “insurance” meaning “make someone else pay for this expensive thing”.
OK, if that’s insurance, then I want Ferrari insurance. Buy me a free Ferrari. I want one.
Only a very stupid person wouldn’t see that.
My company self insures.
I think the question of “why should he worry when you don’t”, is incredibly stupid. Part of my SALARY is health care insurance, it’s just that I don’t see it taken out. Only a fool would not recognize that. It is called a “salary and BENEFITS”, isn’t it?
Well if he’s making 30K…well that’s the problem then isn’t it? Is that my fault? That’s America.
Get a better job, I guess. Some people drive Ferraris without a care in the world to their 5,000 sq. foot beach house. I don’t. Why should they get that and I don’t?
When did I ever say I wouldn’t use medical services? I said the demand for them is high even infinite in some cases if a person doesn’t have to pay for it and has a condition which needs treatment. That’s why overall costs to the economy have risen so much as a % of GDP.
Nice straw man argument.
You do understand the difference between a luxury car and not dying to preventable causes, right?
I suppose you’ve never gotten around to actually reading what the plan is. There is nothing free about it. First, it forces employers who today cut costs by not providing coverage to their employees to provide coverage or to pay a tax to help subsidize insurance for these employees. How would you like it if your employer decided to stick you with the full insurance bill to cut costs?
Second, (and I hope this stays true) they’d offer a public option to compete against the private ones. No one would be forced to take it, and it won’t be free either.
Third, there will be subsidies to make sure everyone gets insurance. That could be called free, but no more than Medicaid is today. Two things will happen. One, with insurance, people will stop going to expensive emergency rooms and go to doctors, which will save a ton of money. They also will either not go bankrupt paying or stop sticking the hospital with the bill, which runs up costs for you and me. Or, people not getting care today will start getting it, and not die, the topic of this thread. If you think them getting care is a bad thing, then I guess you have a point about wasting money.
It sounds like you are referring to the New Yorker article I mentioned, though I suppose the Atlantic could have me-tooed it. Obama agrees with you - this article got wide circulation within the White House. One example was that the doctors in the expensive place recommended an expensive remedy for kidney stones while a much cheaper one did the job just as well, though it took a few days. We should do something about this, but that’s the case no matter who pays for it. Clearly the current system is not working to keep costs down. The anti-change people will start to scream about rationing of the system pays only for the cheaper but just as effective solution, but tough. Anyone can pay for the faster one out of his own pocket.
Partly because everyone in the system has an incentive to let the costs go up, and partly because of more expensive treatments. If costs go up the insurance companies have an incentive to raise their premiums, which increase their profits. If they start to resist, their corporate customers employees will complain and they will lose the business. I’ve never had a claim turned down, but my company is self-insured so they have no incentive to. Individual purchasers seem to have a much worse experience. The very people who would complain would be the onces costing the insurance companies money, so if they get mad and leave the insurance company wins. So it is the middleman. And technology, to some extent. And ah aging population. However technology saves money to some extent. 37 years ago my father was in the hospital for months for a blood clot. 2 years ago, at 90, he was in the hospital for two days with one. The technology that allowed the stents to be put in without open heart surgery saved a bundle. So, it is the middleman to some extent.
So, there is something wrong with a patient wishing to be cured? If there were no insurance, is the patient who can afford to pay out of his own pocket somehow more deserving of being cured than one who can’t?
You seem to be forgetting that this is happening without the reforms. You haven’t demonstrated that reforms would make the situation worse. We already have free, so a system where the working poor gets coverage isn’t going to be any worse.
In fact there are two orthogonal facets to the problem. The first is to reduce costs by the use of evidence based medicine, electronic records, and the proper incentives. Insurance companies finally getting around to standardizing forms should help also. So will a public option that will make the insurance companies get more efficient.
The second part is to make sure everyone gets coverage, and to make sure no one is gaming the system which increases the expense. Those who ware young and healthy and who don’t get coverage until they think they will get more out of it than they put in are gaming the system. Companies who dump their employees onto Medicaid are also gaming the system. But besides this, let’s just have everyone pay a fair percentage of their income for insurance, and not be left with the dilemma of either using food money for it, getting cheap coverage which leaves them open to reasonably catastrophic expenses anyway, or having no coverage at all.
That’s the point.
So a hard working but maybe not very skilled guy doesn’t deserve care for himself or his family in America, care he’d get in Canada or England? That’s not the America I love. That is despicable. The Declaration of Independence does not say all men who make more than $50K a year are equal.
What a great answer. I bet there are better jobs out there than what you have. Why don’t you go and get one? You think people work as janitors because they are too lazy to apply for that rocket scientist position?
BTW, being able to afford treatment when you are in pain is not exactly the same thing as buying a Ferrari, so enough with the specious comparisons.
You are the one saying that free care leads to near infinite demand. Sure you use the care you need, but I bet you don’t go crazy and demand everything, right? I bet you get the proper amount of care, and don’t abuse the system. Why? Do you think you are the only person who feels it would be wrong to be greedy? Are you the only person who has better things to do than go to the doctor? Is your doctor the only one who would probably refuse idiotic requests? Or do you think everyone else thinks that doctors’ waiting rooms are wonderful places to hang out? I’m betting you don’t abuse the system. Why do you think everyone else will?