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medpundit |
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Thursday, April 08, 2004If I had to make a wild guess, our health care system will be paid for by explicit or implicit public funds at a rate of 65-70%. My question is this: if we have a nationalized health care system now, and that system is by your estimation broken, is more nationalization the way to go? Especially when every other sector or industry in this country is privately funded and avoids this problem. Except, that is, for education and the military. Oh, yeah, they're publically funded, too. (The problem of getting health care to the poor is independent of this - there is a big difference between publically funding for those who can't pay for themselves and publically funding those that can.) I've heard others call our system a corporate/socialist system, and I think that phrase best explains what we have going. A large chunk of the bill is picked up by the government, which decides what they'll pay. The rest of the bill is picked up by private insurance companies who decide what they'll pay in their corporate boardrooms. The two people at the heart of the transaction - the patient and the doctor - are entirely out of the loop in deciding the value of the services. And the same goes for the relationship between the pharamcist and the patient. I had two recent cases that highlight how warped this system really is. One of my patients had a pap smear last October. Her pap form was marked incorrectly, resulting in the lab performing an extra test that wasn't medically necessary. Her insurance wouldn't cover it, so she got a bill for $148. Since it was my fault, I offered to credit her account. But, she only pays a $10 co-pay for each visit, and she usually only comes in once a year for her pap. It would take me over 14 years to give her back anything of comparable value to that one laboratory test. I'm getting paid more than $10 for the paps, once you count the insurance payments, but to the consumer of my services, they're only worth $10. The other is a patient who is what most reasonable people would consider "well-off." The other day he was lamenting that he couldn't find a prescription allergy medication that worked. He ended by saying, "Too bad Claritin isn't available anymore. That worked wonders for me." I pointed out that it is available. It's just over the counter now. His response was, "But buying it over the counter would be a waste of my insurance!" He'd rather have have his insurance company pay for an ineffective medication and suffer his allergy symptoms than fork over the money for an effective medication himself. Folks, this is not a free market system. This is a free market system. posted by Sydney on 4/08/2004 08:59:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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