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Monday, October 14, 2002Private health insurance premiums are rising at an unsustainable average of about 13 percent per year — and as much as 25 percent in some areas of the country. Coverage is shrinking, as more employers decide to cap their contributions to health insurance plans and workers find they cannot pay their rapidly expanding share. And with the rise in unemployment, more people are losing what limited coverage they had. Last month, the Census Bureau reported that nearly 1.5 million Americans lost their insurance in 2001. ....Private insurers regularly skim off the top 10 percent to 25 percent of premiums for administrative costs, marketing and profits. The remainder is passed along a gantlet of satellite businesses — insurance brokers, disease-management and utilization-review companies, lawyers, consultants, billing agencies, information management firms and so on. Their function is often to limit services in one way or another. They, too, take a cut, including enough for their own administrative costs, marketing and profits. As much as half the health-care dollar never reaches doctors and hospitals — who themselves face high overhead costs in dealing with multiple insurers. One more absurdity of our market-based system: the pressure is to increase total health-care expenditures, not reduce them. Presumably, as a nation we want to constrain the growth of health costs. But that's simply not what health-care businesses do. Like all businesses, they want more, not fewer, customers — but only if they can pay. Her solution, however - a single payer system - is all wrong. Only a doctor who’s never had to deal with government-run programs could say this: Medicare is not perfect, but it's the most popular part of the American health-care system. The problem with the “third party pays” system, whether it’s composed of one or a thousand payers, is that it prevents the patient from acknowledging that every healthcare decision comes with a price. Direct-to-consumer advertising for expensive new drugs never would have been so successful if people had to pay for those drugs out of their pockets. The proliferation of drugs to reduce risks by even the smallest of percentages would never have happened, either. There are, of course, some medical illnesses and conditions for which people have no choice - emergency surgery, or trauma care, for example, but catastrophic health insurance could cover those sorts of expenses. The current system that provides insurance for every little doctor’s visit is just too expensive. Making it a single, government-run program won’t make it any less expensive, but it could make it cost a lot more. Congress can’t restrain itself now from holding hearings on diseases-of-the-week or cancer screening policies. Imagine how much more intrusive they would be if they were footing the bill for everyone. P.S. DB agrees. For Example: Consider how single-payer healthcare systems around the world are doing - Australia: "Medicare is meant to be a system of health care for everybody and everybody at the moment is unable to get timely medical care." England: Pat Adams has chronic arthritis. Earlier this year, the 62-year-old from King's Lynne was told she would need one of her hips replaced. Faced with a 15-month wait on the NHS and struggling to cope with excruciating pain, she re-mortgaged her house to pay the 8,000 pound cost of traveling to South Africa to have the operation. She is one of an estimated 250,000 people who, disillusioned with the NHS, have dug into their own pockets this year to pay for essential medical treatment in the private sector. ... "The NHS was once the best in the world. When I was in South Africa they called it the Third World NHS. I don't think the situation is going to change. It is very sad." Canada: "Quite apart from the issue of an aging population, Canada has had difficulty retaining and recruiting human resources in the health sector for at least a decade." New Zealand:: But sadly, he feels that everything he has worked for is being destroyed by a Government which has turned the health system into business run by health planners, politicians and accountants. (Read it all. A mere excerpt doesn’t do it justice.) posted by Sydney on 10/14/2002 07:11:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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