We live in a capitalist society that is supposed to thrive on competition and the checks and balances of a free market. This means that the person / corporation who can provide the best product at the lowest competitive price should be rewarded with the lion's share of the consumers business. However, it seems as though health insurance companies, doctors, dentists, optometrists, nurses and all others in the health industry want their cake and eat it too so to speak. They set and control the price of their various services and under the new health care plan we will be forced to buy (in a pool) their services at their price. If we don't, we will be fined or penalized. WTFO- Is this a "Free Market"?
Along these lines, I am old enough to remember when the people did not have any type of health insurance / health coverage. I know for a fact that my mother and father had none. This in a time when doctors made house calls and a hospital stay did not put one in debt for a lifetime. Nor did a doctors house call or one's surgery or stay in a hospital require others to "chip in" to pay for another's health care.
I had three stays in a (Catholic) hospital when I was a child. All required a doctor's care and each event required at least a one week stay in the hospital. I know that with my parent's income at the time they could not have afforded a high-cost hospital or doctor's bill. So, how did they manage to pay for those three events? Why do you suppose that doctors made house calls or that surgery and a hospital stay did not cost and arm and a leg? I believe that at that time doctors and hospitals had to compete. They did not have an insurance company or the government (We The People) to pay their bills.
Somehow, around the year1956, things changed. That is when I first started hearing about Kaiser (insurance) Plans. It seems to me that that with the invention of medicare and health insurance everything changed. Doctors stopped making house calls, people began to abuse the system, go to the doctor for every little sniffle or use the emergency room for non-emergency care. With these inventions, (interfering with a free market) health costs began to rise.
Would it better to go back to a free market and pure competition in our health care? If each person / family were responsible for their own health care costs would fewer people go to the doctor or go to the emergency room? Would people keep better care of themselves? If fewer people went to hospitals or to a doctor would not those institutions have to lower their prices and make themselves more available?
I said at the beginning of this article, I have good health coverage. However, I also know that not only me but someone else has to pay for this benefit. It seems to me that such a system encourages the health care industry to charge whatever they can get away with because so many people are paying into it. There has to be a better way and I think that we may be better off to be self-reliant as were the americans of an earlier time.
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ReplyDeleteI'm glad you're back, and that your wife is well.
ReplyDeleteOver the summer, I cared for my mother as she died of cancer. Uninsured and unemployed - too young for Medicare and not qualified for Medicaid - she was one of those "through the cracks" cases. What I wanted more than anything else was to have the people who make decisions about health care legislation come and live with her for a month, just to see what a real person in real crisis looks and lives (and, not for nothing, dies) like.
I don't claim to have an inkling about HOW we got into this mess, and I'm not entirely sure how we get out of it. I do know, however, that things continuing as they are will result in something breaking in a catastrophic way. I'd like to see us make changes before that happens, but I'm not holding my breath.
(reposted to correct dumb typos...)