I absolutely agree with you 100%. Just looking at the stock charts of the top insurance companies supports this completely. They laughed all the way to the bank amongst the cries of “government takeover of healthcare!” and “socialism!”
Insulin is pretty cheap. However, there are some people who don’t have insurance who potential forego insulin (or even doctors visits to learn they may have diabetes and require insulin) and this leads to major complications. We’re talking amputations and strokes. Much cheaper to ensure people have insulin and remove any financial barriers there.
Most of those issues are tethered to the nature of our system. I argue we need to change our system.
Per capita is absolutely the way to evaluate costs. It’s the only way to compare apples to apples between different nations. It basically shows how much it costs to fund our healthcare system on an individual basis.
Before we even get to answering the 30% paying for 95%, let’s bring the 100% figure down drastically. Then no matter how we decide to divvy up the payments, everyone is going to be better off. Agree?
The only benefit obamacare had was how many times the website crashed. Anyone else remember that? I lost count how many times it crashed. We then got to watch obama hand out extensions for his union cronies.
You didn’t have any sympathy for Trump voters that lost their health care after the ACA. We were told than elections have consequences. Shut up and get in the back of the bus we running the show now.
While I am not sure the GOP would do better on healthcare than the democrats, it seems odd that with Obamacare people are still defending this horrible law. The left wanted a single payer system what they got was crumbs and the rest of the country still has to deal with higher premiums.
Yet I still hear many defending it and defending what was basically a republican plan (Romneycare).
I’ll defend the good parts—community rating, guaranteed issue, removing lifetime caps, lowering annual maximums, etc.
But it was a bandaid on the festering wound that is our healthcare system. And ever since its passage, the GOP has made every effort to remove that bandaid and rub some dirt in the wound.
The Democrats wanted single payer. To compromise, they threw that out the window and adopted the conservative individual mandate plan. Among the cries of “Socialism!” rose a corporatist behemoth. Can we please put it to rest and implement the system we desperately need?
I’m not sure I agree with that. Yes, I saw the special. I believe patient behavior is the larger problem.
I disagree with the per capita evaluation. It is not a valuable metric in my opinion. It is an average from a collectivist mindset and indicative of nothing.
I do agree that the cost of healthcare is too high, for every citizen in this country . Anecedotally, I hear a lot of stories of price negotiating going on at an individual level. People being told not to use their insurance and “What can you pay?”
But financials barriers are a huge driver of patient behavior.
Let’s switch it around. Can’t it be viewed as an individualist mindset? It’s the average cost of health care on an individual basis. If our health care expenditures were paid for in a “fair” manner and everyone carried the same exact cost, that’s how much it would be. Additionally, it’s how we can compare our costs to other systems on an apples-to-apples basis. I’m curious, how else could we possibly measure how expensive our system is in a more meaningful way?
I experienced this prior to the ACA in 2008 or 2009. I was right out of school, just married, and on my wife’s insurance because I had just changed jobs from a fortune 500 company to a start up. Pretty decent UnitedHealthcare insurance. Had a lump on my thigh, freaked out and thought it was a tumor (history of cancer in my family). My PCP ordered up an ultrasound and I paid with insurance. Got the bill—$450 for the tech to do the 10 minute ultrasound and $400 from the radiologist to look at it for I’m sure all of 2 minutes to determine that it was inconclusive and I needed an MRI. Told my PCP how much this cost me and she referred me to a cash-only clinic and a sports medicine doctor and I spent $150 on the MRI and $60 co-pay for the SM doctor to read the image.
Our fractured system is a huge cause of this. Our for-profit, rent seeking insurance companies promote these inflated costs. They will pay a larger portion of a bill from a hospital than Medicare or Medicaid because they want those hospital prices to continue to rise. It’s in their interest for those prices to rise because they can then just spread those costs out via premiums since the majority of that burden is carried by businesses. Those increased prices then lead to increased profits because a hospital raising its prices doesn’t do anything to raise the bottom line of the insurance companies. Like we both agreed on before, the insurance companies love this. It’s reflected in their stock prices.
A solution to this problem can be found by simply looking at how invoiced hospital prices have increased over time compared to what Medicare has paid out. Because Medicare is a Honey Badger. It don’t give a ■■■■■ It’s gonna pay out what it says and not play the Inflated Hospital Bill game.
Agreed. But I don’t think it’s the same barrier as you are identifying. Are most of the people we are talking about salaried or hourly?
That’s not on an individual basis, average is by definition collective. Per capita ignores the fact that everyone doesn’t pay, some pay a little and some pay a lot. That is the basic problem I have with all these collectivist programs. A better way would be percentage of earnings.
I don’t disagree with your overall assessment of the situation.
