Too Expensive
Random thoughts ensue..
I don't know anything about healthcare other than it is damn expensive. The NCHC just quoted a recent study which says that on our current trajectory, by the year 2018 healthcare costs will account for nearly 4.4 trillion dollars, or about 30% of our GDP. They also said employer-paid healthcare for a family of four in 2018 will cost 25,000 a year. Geez, like I needed another reason to not want kids...
in 2007, 67% of all bankruptcies were due to medical expenses. 80% of those people who filed chapter 11 had healthcare. I suppose this makes sense because the uninsured don't pay for their hospital visits; which is just one more cause of increased premiums and costs.
Is a government program the answer to our problems? This study doesn't seem directly imply it; in three years Medicare and Medicaid will account for 50% of all healthcare costs.
Some of the reasons for these outrageous numbers are pretty clear: "inefficiencies, excessive administrative expenses, inflated prices, poor management and inappropriate care, waste and fraud". We also have a society which is increasingly obese and sick all the while being terribly afraid of death. We spend more on palliative care than any other nation. We also spend 1/3 of our healthcare money on things like unnecessary tests, bullshit idiocy like acupuncture and holistic 'cures', and other things that don't actually improve health. In this arena patients are to blame; their demands for shit that doesn't work is driving up our costs.
How can costs be lowered? The democrats currently control just about everything there is to control in government and they can't get any type of meaningful reform passed. Gutless morons... How could G. W. Bush pass just about anything he wanted while controlling nothing? Thanks Democrats for giving us Obama, a political eunuch.
Its hard to know what to think. Its obvious we have good doctors in this country, we have the top medical science and the best drugs, but we also have a public that wants more-more-more when it comes to healthcare. Maybe if we didn't view everything as a health problem we wouldn't spend so much.
I'm resisting the temptation to blame everything on insurance companies. The principal of Hanlon's Razor tells us that we shouldn't attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity. Its not that Aetna and others are completely greedy; they surely are to some degree, but the people they are covering, the general public, is definitely stupid.
So, my conclusion is this: our health care is so expensive because we have a stupid populace which is serviced by a greedy insurance system.
I don't know anything about healthcare other than it is damn expensive. The NCHC just quoted a recent study which says that on our current trajectory, by the year 2018 healthcare costs will account for nearly 4.4 trillion dollars, or about 30% of our GDP. They also said employer-paid healthcare for a family of four in 2018 will cost 25,000 a year. Geez, like I needed another reason to not want kids...
in 2007, 67% of all bankruptcies were due to medical expenses. 80% of those people who filed chapter 11 had healthcare. I suppose this makes sense because the uninsured don't pay for their hospital visits; which is just one more cause of increased premiums and costs.
Is a government program the answer to our problems? This study doesn't seem directly imply it; in three years Medicare and Medicaid will account for 50% of all healthcare costs.
Some of the reasons for these outrageous numbers are pretty clear: "inefficiencies, excessive administrative expenses, inflated prices, poor management and inappropriate care, waste and fraud". We also have a society which is increasingly obese and sick all the while being terribly afraid of death. We spend more on palliative care than any other nation. We also spend 1/3 of our healthcare money on things like unnecessary tests, bullshit idiocy like acupuncture and holistic 'cures', and other things that don't actually improve health. In this arena patients are to blame; their demands for shit that doesn't work is driving up our costs.
How can costs be lowered? The democrats currently control just about everything there is to control in government and they can't get any type of meaningful reform passed. Gutless morons... How could G. W. Bush pass just about anything he wanted while controlling nothing? Thanks Democrats for giving us Obama, a political eunuch.
Its hard to know what to think. Its obvious we have good doctors in this country, we have the top medical science and the best drugs, but we also have a public that wants more-more-more when it comes to healthcare. Maybe if we didn't view everything as a health problem we wouldn't spend so much.
I'm resisting the temptation to blame everything on insurance companies. The principal of Hanlon's Razor tells us that we shouldn't attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity. Its not that Aetna and others are completely greedy; they surely are to some degree, but the people they are covering, the general public, is definitely stupid.
So, my conclusion is this: our health care is so expensive because we have a stupid populace which is serviced by a greedy insurance system.
posted by doeman at
2:45 PM
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