Obama plan would provide health care for all – USATODAY.com.
Doctors and insurance companies really need a wake up call. Doctors, who have long been taking advantage of the system, are obviously against the government offering health insurance choices. I will say that one big cost of the medical profession is malpractice insurance. That needs to change. Let’s start with the ambulance chaser attorneys and crack down on unnecessary medical lawsuits. That should lower malpractice insurance premiums. Then, let’s deal with insurance companies and doctors.
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June 7th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Insurance companies make money because they are allowed to discriminate in their selection of clients, cherry picking the best and declining those that present an unacceptable risk. Unacceptable in their eyes usually means anyone who pays for coverage and would have the audacity to file a claim for benefits. But health insurers do it because the government has failed to enable health care providers to truly compete within a marketplace dominated by outdated rules and regulations and saddled with fraud and waste.
With the proposed Obama plan, we will pretend medical care is a right, that insurance is a utility, and we will let everyone buy coverage and truly spread the risk. Oh, but wait,. Some people simply don’t want to pay! But that’s OK, with a government run plan, everyone else continues to pay – and surprise – they pay more than what they receive because the uninsured *still* receive benefits without paying. Not only to support the new government bureaucracy that is required to manage such a system but because the public health care facilities out there now enable the uninsured – whether or not they are even US residents – to receive benefits and to pass their costs on by increasing the premiums of the insured.
Setting aside the notion that anyone in government is even slightly capable of taking on this challenge, how long will it take until people figure out that they can bilk the system, the government won’t catch on and those that don’t pay never have to pay? That would be yesterday and the program is Medicare. And it’s going broke because the Ponzi-scheme approach for financing it requires a continuing supply of fresh money. Money that it used to get because thousands of folks entering into the workforce paid in only to receive benefits in their later years. But a funny thing happened along the way. A smaller pool of new workers means smaller contributions and those have become insufficient to cover the increased numbers of folks living longer who are unable to privately cover the rising costs of health care treatment.
The economics here just don’t work. How does Obama plan to fix this? Increase the number of plan participants, lower their costs of participation and shift the burden to – you guessed it – all those folks already propping up the system. Yeah, that plan sounds like a winner.
Better yet, take those doctors who have spent hundred of thousands of dollars investing in their education, ask them to serve more patients, pay them less by reducing the reimbursements of services performed, and ask them to subsidize these improvements by their personal earnings. Couple that scenario with enhanced insurance costs due to a larger number of patients demanding retribution for every medical error (whether there is a cap or not) and we have a meltdown in the making.
When the dust settles, the truly good doctors will eschew the system to get paid on a fee for service basis. That is, if they stay in medicine at all. Doctors will only offer those services that provide them the best chance to earn a living. Those physicians who are not so gifted may remain in medicine, but they won’t be investing in plant and equipment, buying new diagnostic equipment, or trying to develop new drug formulations. No they will turn into medical bureaucrats. They’ll be attending to rules, lowering the overall standard of care and responsiveness of the health system to meet enhanced demand for access and generally acting like the low margin fungible personel they will have become.
Wait a minute, that’s the current workers compensation system in a nutshell! The one where no one wants to help anyone because there’s no financial incentive for anyone to do anything for anyone else. Bring on that new regime, I can hardly wait for rationed care.