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Old 10-17-2009, 06:04 PM
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ryan1234
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Originally Posted by KC10 FATboy View Post
This thread closes in 3....2....1....

If the current legislation passes, private healthcare companies die. Why? Here's why.

The people who are on the government plan pay less and as such do not have the same options or benefits as the people who can afford the more expensive private plans. Suddenly, when they are denied a procedure or certain level of care not provided by the government, they then go to a private healthcare company and demand to be covered. Remember, it is now against the law to deny coverage based on existing conditions.

So now, we have a system where people can free loaf off the government plan, but when it doesn't work for them, they demand something from the private companies that they never paid for. Can you say bankruptcy?

ryan1234, I've been to many countries, developed and undeveloped. If I had to choose a place to get sick, it would be in the U.S.A.
I probably should have posted the rest of the article, because it kind of ties things together. Here is a few segments:

The experience of other rich nations should also make us skeptical. Whatever their histories, nearly all developed countries are now struggling with rapidly rising health-care costs, including those with single-payer systems. From 2000 to 2005, per capita health-care spending in Canada grew by 33 percent, in France by 37 percent, in the U.K. by 47 percent—all comparable to the 40 percent growth experienced by the U.S. in that period. Cost control by way of bureaucratic price controls has its limits.
Hospitals are indeed required to provide emergency care to any walk-in patient, and this obligation is a meaningful public service. But how do we know whether the charitable benefit from this requirement justifies the social cost of expensive hospital care and poor quality? We don’t know. Our system of health-care law and regulation has so distorted the functioning of the market that it’s impossible to measure the social costs and benefits of maintaining hospitals’ prominence. And again, the distortions caused by a reluctance to pay directly for health care—in this case, emergency medicine for the poor—are in large part to blame.
But my father was not the customer; Medicare was. And although Medicare has experimented with new reimbursement approaches to drive better results, no centralized reimbursement system can be supple enough to address the many variables affecting the patient experience. Certainly, Medicare wasn’t paying for the quality of service during my dad’s hospital stay. And it wasn’t really paying for the quality of his care, either; indeed, because my dad got sepsis in the hospital, and had to spend weeks there before his death, the hospital was able to charge a lot more for his care than if it had successfully treated his pneumonia and sent him home in days.
In fact, as a result of our fraying insurance system, you can already see some nascent features of a consumer-centered system. Since 2006, Wal-Mart has offered $4 prescriptions for a month’s supply of common generic medications. It has also been slowly rolling out retail clinics for routine care such as physicals, blood work, and treatment for common ailments like strep throat. Prices for each service are easily obtained; most are in the neighborhood of $50 to $80. Likewise, “concierge care,” or the “boutique” style of medical practice—in which physicians provide unlimited services and fast appointments in return for a fixed monthly or annual fee—is beginning to spread from the rich to the middle class. Qliance Medical Group, for instance, now operates clinics serving some 3,000 patients in the Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, areas, charging $49 to $79 a month for unlimited primary care, defined expansively.
Ten days after my father’s death, the hospital sent my mother a copy of the bill for his five-week stay: $636,687.75. He was charged $11,590 per night for his ICU room; $7,407 per night for a semiprivate room before he was moved to the ICU; $145,432 for drugs; $41,696 for respiratory services. Even the most casual effort to compare these prices to marginal costs or to the costs of off-the-shelf components demonstrates the absurdity of these numbers, but why should my mother care? Her share of the bill was only $992; the balance, undoubtedly at some huge discount, was paid by Medicare.
Wasn’t this an extraordinary benefit, a windfall return on American citizenship? Or at least some small relief for a distraught widow?
Not really. You can feel grateful for the protection currently offered by Medicare (or by private insurance) only if you don’t realize how much you truly spend to fund this system over your lifetime, and if you believe you’re getting good care in return.
The current reform will likely expand our government’s already massive role in health-care decision-making—all just to continue the illusion that someone else is paying for our care......Do you really believe that the hospital—forced to face the victim of its poor-quality service, forced to collect the bill from the real customer—wouldn’t have figured out how to make its doctors wash their hands?
The basic thought in the article is that.... maybe there is another way besides comprehensive insurance and government intervention. Let the real market level the playing field. The American people seem to believe more so now that they are better off if someone else is picking up the tab - that they are somehow getting a "good deal" from the government or insurance. The health-care market has just become so distorted it's hard to see any way out.
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