Let me go on the record as saying once and for all that the reason health care costs as much as it does in this country is the health insurance industry. Here’s how:
- Because most consumers neither directly pay for care, nor even directly pay the people who do pay for it, any possible market forces are undermined.
- Most patients have no control over who their insurance company is, and therefore cannot effectively demand lower premiums or better coverage.
- Most insurance companies force consumers to either select from a short list of approved doctors, clinics, and hospitals — or pay much higher out of pocket costs.
- Doctors who want to be paid must agree to contracts that will pay them less than fifty cents for every dollar billed (paid up to 90 days later), yet prevent them from giving cash discounts to people who are not paying via insurance reimbursement.
- The for profit insurance model guaranties a system where people are paid to not provide care; every dollar of “profit” can be considered “overcharged premiums” or “under-paid bills”.
- Even without a profit motive, almost none of the expenses of the insurance company provide any care whatsoever.
- Medical facilities must spend money on a “biller” — an employee or contractor who provides no care, but is necessary to fill out the complicated forms required for insurance reimbursement.
- Some insurance “cost control” measures actually cost more money in the long run: demanding a cheap test to prove that the “expensive” test your doctor thinks will actually have important results is needed; paying for an expensive hospital bed rather than a relatively inexpensive hospice bed; inadequate hospital stays that increase the likelihood of another hospitalization.
Now, I am not the only person who has noticed that health insurance bureaucrats now fill the bogeyman roll of “faceless government bureaucrats” conservatives use to scare us. Nor am I the only person to notice how quickly the health insurers backed off their handshake agreement with the President to control costs — oh, that might violate anti-trust laws!
We’ve got a broken system now. A system where even people who have insurance are bypassing care because of expense. A system where people are getting married for insurance reasons. And yet the insurance companies and the politicians they have bought keep telling us that no, we don’t want Medicare for All. They keep trying to scare us with horror stories about a small number of Canadians, and ignore the hundreds of people we know having horror stories here. Some people say we can’t afford reform, but the truth is we can’t afford not to reform.
Let’s keep the pressure on.
Need talking points? Here’s 10 of them.
In Closing: Ethanol; how are we supposed to prevent identity theft when the IRS is busy selling our tax info?; Plunge in GM stock value means Tesla Motors is now worth half as much as GM; more evidence that biometrics isn’t security, some medications will remove your fingerprints; Fun With Jesus; California, money, and the death penalty; “So very much like ‘judicial activism’ and its various cognates, when conservatives talk about judges ‘making policy’ or ‘legislating from the bench’ all they really mean is ‘judges ruling in ways we don’t like.'”; Presidential Trivia; and the MTV Movie Awards ought to be interesting, Andy Samberg is hosting.