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| Re: Gibbs Can't Name Countries Where Government Health Care Works Better (467368) | |||
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Re: Gibbs Can't Name Countries Where Government Health Care Works Better |
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Posted by trainsarefun on Fri Jun 26 23:39:02 2009, in response to Re: Gibbs Can't Name Countries Where Government Health Care Works Better, posted by Orange Blossom Special on Fri Jun 26 22:24:58 2009. Plus, you can't really go on Miami for just about anything. It's its own planet.Miami IS different... Sometimes they bill for things they didn't even do. Reminds me of a stat that said most hospital bills are full of errors. I assume it's those long tedious itemized bills, the ones they send to the insurers aren't always that long as they lump the catagories at times. Part of the motivation to pad, as I understand it, comes from hospitals' and physicians' fears that they will not receive what they actually feel that they merit if they don't do pad the bill. Of course, on the flip side, insurers know that this is done, and they persist in not paying out in full on many claims, so the game continues. Doctors claim in Florida that they do a lot of procedures to cover for lawsuits. That's the same everywhere, just about. So called 'defensive medicine' is what the profession calls it. Part of it is that there really is a problem with a small fraction of physicians who commit most of the errors and massive screwups and yet continue on in the practice. And part of it is that there's a lot of money in it for the personal injury bar. You get sued 3 times, you lose your license. I believe I heard sue and not actually convicted... No, no - not just sued. Most physicians nowadays will probably be sued during their careers, some perhaps several times, their fault or not, more so in some specialties than others. Their malpractice insurance goes up, both on account of the personal injury bar and on account of the screwups whose premiums they are keeping to a tolerable level, and of course they and their employers pass those costs on to the end consumer. At any rate, to solve a problem, it's best to know exactly what the problem is first or else you'll never solve it. Definitely. The insurance companies seem very into this reform thing, and are backing it with their own ideas. Their industry sees an opportunity here. First, they want single payer off the table. And it is. Second, that out of the way, they want to shape whatever legislation that passes to most help themselves. From what I read, they are throwing their weight behind favorable (to them) forms of the Healthy Americans Act/Bipartisan Healthcare Bill/Wyden-Bennett (all names for the same legislation), because being good businessmen, why waste a chance to reap a windfall? And hell, if I were in their line of work, I would probably do the same. But they don't appear to be fighting it. Some of them are using reform in all their marketing and operations campaigns. They are by no means stupid. They realize that public opinion wants something called reform, and they can't stop that. But they can affect the content of the reform, and if it's beneficial to them, why not push things that way? Ultimately, I think that that we really have to review what we want out of our healthcare system, how we want to pay for it, how much we want to pay for it, and how effective it will be. And all of these factors affect each other. You pay very little for some system and there will be less innovation, less effectiveness, but you have more money to spend on other things. Healthcare isn't an unlimited resource, and I think that has to be a starting point for any discussion. Most of our limited resources are distributed according to ability and willingness to pay. I hear people on many sides of the debate talk as though either a private plan or a public plan should give them something like an inalienable right to healthcare, but for me, these people start off from an incorrect premise. I think that you start out from the right premise, correct the system where it is sabotaging one of the factors for no good reason (e.g., people going to the ER at very high cost for some chronic condition instead of going for checkups as appropriate at some clinic for much lower cost), promote competitiveness to lower prices, streamline regulation, try to get everyone some sort of catastrophic coverage, and try to arrange tax and other structures such that people can better afford healthcare (e.g., HSAs). If however one starts out either from the public sector or the private sector trying to arrive at unlimited healthcare resources for everyone, I think that this is the road to nowhere. |
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