It is the reason my wife and I (and our software business) left the USA.
My guess is that you have health insurance. I’d like to buy it, but my six-figure salary is not enough because I have a pre-existing condition (for which I have spent perhaps $2,000 over ten years)… and insurance is not available at any price for me.
Imagine using your car insurance to pay for oil changes, new tires, windshield dings and other routine maintenance. I know, the very idea is stupid. Now flash back to the world of reality where we use health insurance to pay for physicals, flu shots, trips to the doc over a cold, and other routine health issues. Ridiculous. The purpose of insurance is to cover major problems that you can’t normally cover on your own, such as getting rear ended in your car or developing colon cancer. Healthcare is not going to be able to be fixed (as in lower costs) until we start using insurance responsibly. That is one step which leads to the next, lowering the cost to see a doctor. Costs have run out of control because doctors and pharmaceutical companies have the deep pockets of insurance companies to hit rather than the shallow pockets of the working person. Now if we give doctors and pharmaceutical companies access to pockets deeper than private companies, they are going to show the same restraint they have shown when dealing with private insurance companies.
I am paying over $1000 a month for insurance for my wife and I. If there is a long list of medical expenses that are no longer covered, we are well and truly screwed. If you approach is adopted, I would have to see a significant drop in my premium; what is the likelyhood of that?
That’s exactly the point where the “lazy thinking” part comes in (for me at least) in looking at the big picture over how the current insurance situation is adversely affecting the economy, business and labor in this country. That concept combined with “what if I lost my job, or my partner who carries the coverage got hit by a bus tomorrow?”… it seems to me that the folks I’ve talked this over with haven’t even gotten that far in their mental exploration of the topic. This acquaintance of mine that I mentioned, she has never had a job, never been expected to do or be anything other than a dutiful mom and housewife and servant of the lord, her husband provides for her and their extensive family. She has a seizure disorder. I honestly could not get her to wrap her head around the notion of how she would provide health insurance for herself and her four children if her husband went belly-up tomorrow. She says “it would be expensive, but that’s better than rationing care and death panels.” She honestly couldn’t grasp that “expensive” in this case means “uninsured”, and that waiting a little to see the doctor is better than not seeing the doctor ever at all. Unless they’ve got a giant Scrooge McDuck vault of gold stashed away somewhere, I would be willing to bet that it would be a real problem, but she’s either unwilling or unable to consider what this whole situation really means to her, in the big picture. That really is stupid… or mentally lazy, one.
Also, even if the status quo is “okay” for most, we really and truly could make things so much better. I read an article on the topic the other day that ended with a line something like “rarely have a group of people in this country been so furiously opposed to something that would so obviously be an improvement over what they now have. It’s nothing less than a testament to the power of industry propaganda.” That about sums it up for me.
It sounds like a good argument, but I suspect if it wasn’t profitable for these visits to be covered the insurance companies would already have gotten out of the business of covering them. When the combined cost between an employer and employee means paying thousands out per month for the coverage, paying out for a routine annual physical is absolutely not “ridiculous”, and if paying a few bucks for a flu shot means a fair chance of saving hundreds or thousands in treatment costs, that sure seems cost-effective to me.
Anyway, think of it this way: the insurance company pays a couple hundred bucks for a routine physical. If that routine visit catches the colon or breast cancer early on in the game, don’t you think that was a wise move (financially speaking) on the insurance company’s part? If they had not paid for the annual exam, there’s a very real likelihood that the patient doesn’t come in until they realize there’s an obvious issue, by which time it has become a very expensive problem to fix.
My personal opinion on the topic is more or less exactly opposite from yours… that if we shifted to a model more focused on health and wellness up front we’d lower our costs in the end.
The likelihood is very high. Insurance policies with higher deductibles are always cheaper than ones with lower deductibles.
This is actually the true solution to the health care problem. Government should provide catastrophic care insurance, indexed to income. People should be left to fend for themselves for the rest. They can seek gap insurance or get it through their employer or whatever. Gap insurance would be MUCH less expensive, and everyone could choose the deductibles that fit their personal financial situation and save money. In the meantime, injecting the consumer back into the mix regarding prices and choices about services would do much to restore the cockeyed system of incentives that 3rd party payment causes.
As for what’s wrong wtih universal health care - this should be a warning sign: 45% of doctors would consider quitting if Congress passes health care overhaul. Now, of course it’s easy to say this, and I don’t believe for a second that that many doctors would quit. But it does signal widespread dissatisfaction with the direction the government is taking with health care, which will eventually have an impact. Some doctors will quit, others will stop working long hours or take early retirement. The number of doctors that move to the U.S. to work may slow down.
And it’s never been satisfactorily explained how adding 30 million new people to the insurance roles will be managed, given that there is no corresponding increase in the number of doctors available to treat them. It seems clear that doctor time will have to be pulled from other things. This is almost guaranteed to decrease the quality of care available to people who already have insurance.
A guy named Kerry proposed essentially that when he was running for President five years ago. I’d still be perfectly OK with that approach, if the debate out in the real world wasn’t quite so far along.
You’re citing the Investor’s Business Daily as a reputable source. That would be a mistake.
A slightly more reliable poll:
When given a three-way choice among private plans that use tax credits or subsidies to help the poor buy private insurance; a new public health insurance plan such as Medicare; or a mix of the two; 63 percent of doctors supported a mix, 27 percent said they only wanted private options, and just 10 percent said they exclusively wanted public options.
The survey of 2,130 U.S. doctors, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also found that more 55 percent, regardless of their medical specialty, would favor expanding Medicare so it covered people aged 55 and older.
…
In most cases I expect Grandma could get on the respirator, being over 65 and eligible for Medicare (most Grandmas are 65 or over, right?).
Cost is a factor, but I would think something could be worked out. One reason Medicare is expensive is that it covers the sickest demographic. The same might be said of Medicaid to a lesser extent.
I think a bigger issue for the right wing is its castigation as socialism. Or fascism, or communism, or whatever they’re calling it. Some actually believe that through prudence and providence anyone can get and afford health coverage/care with the system we have now. Because you see if these high-on-the-hog profligates didn’t take the family out to a movie or dinner at Coco’s once in a while, they could save up the fifty bucks to pay the doc to set their broken leg…
Where oh where do you get your goofy right wing stats from.? I assume not Fox, but it seems as reliable.
Nate Silver says of this pollster: “There are pollsters out there that have an agenda but are highly competent, and there are pollsters that are nonpartisan but not particularly skilled. Rarely, however, do you find the whole package: that special pollster which is both biased and inept. IBD/TIPP is one of the few exceptions.”