Health Care Reform Part 2
This is a continuation of my previous post Health Care Reform Part 1. In this post I will discuss some of the absurdities of the current health care system and possible solutions to improve the program.
Okay, in Part 1 we have agreed there is a problem with health care and we have demonstrated that the Obama plan will be a very costly failure, so let’s talk of a genuine solution.
Here it is !
Are you ready for it ?
I bet not !
100% Socialized Health Care
Yep, you read it right. All health care costs must be paid for via the government by taxes applied to the populace. But before you flame me, back away from the keyboard and read why this doesn’t have to be executed as badly or as costly as so many people are afraid it might.
The current process goes something like this:
Scenario 1
You become sick, you weigh the probability of what illness you have being covered by your insurance policy, you decide that you are too sick to ignore the problem and try to make an appointment with your doctor, they can’t fit you in right away so you have to wait another day or two before an appointment can be made. You show up at the doctors office twenty minutes before your scheduled appointment in dire hope that there has been a cancellation, but there have been no cancellations, instead there have been several walk-ins so the doctor is running an hour late. If you cancel now you will be billed a cancellation fee so you decide to stay. Even though you have insurance you still have to give them money to cover your co-pay (who knows what the logic behind this is but someone somewhere has gotten rich off it) you then wait for two hours as the original one hour behind schedule was really a pipe dream all the while being infected with whatever everyone else in the waiting room is hacking up. You finally get in to see the doctor who spends five minutes in consult writes a prescription for the drug that he gets the best commission from the drug company to sell and sends you on your way. If you are lucky you have a prescription drug card that covers 100% of the costs of your prescription drugs, but you are a hard working, law abiding US citizen which means you are not lucky and the particular drug your doctor wrote the ‘script for is not available in a generic form manufactured in Asia, it is only available in the genuine copy write formula so you have to pay 50% of the very high cost. It is expensive because the manufacturer has to make as much money as possible before their patent runs out and generic varieties produced overseas start being shipped in by the megaton undercutting their production and development costs.
Some may think I’m joking but anyone familiar with health care knows that the sad sorry above is all too common of an occurrence.
Now let’s examine the process in a properly run socialized system. You are sick, you go to the doctors, you wait (Yes, the waiting will still be there until massive numbers of new medical professionals are educated and inserted into the system, this will take YEARS so get used to the wait.) You see the doctor, you are handed the necessary prescription, you go home. No money changes hands, no forms to fill out, no claims to make. No being hassled by the insurance company that they are refusing your coverage, no being hassled by the doctors office that you are responsible for the costs as the insurance company is refusing to cover you. Most importantly no getting turned away at the doctors office because they no longer accept your particular insurance due to repeated non payment.
“How can this happen?” you ask. By taxes. Everyone who lives in a particular county will pay a percentage of the total cost of health care administered in said county. I encourage it to be done on a county by county basis as the average county already has the necessary medical infrastructure in place and compiling a budget for all the various health care providers should not be too difficult. You then simply divide that sum by the number of people residing in the county and you have the base amount that needs to be charged to each individual.
First let us discuss actual operating costs vs. the cost of insurance premiums. If you don’t have health insurance and you go to the hospital you can figure that a visit with any type of surgery as well as diagnostic procedures are going to cost you about $150,000.00 assuming you are only in the hospital for a week or two. If you do have insurance the company will typically negotiate the cost down to less than $100,000.00. Still very expensive but it does reveal the true cost of medical care compared to what the medical profession would like to charge. There is a distinct lack of ethics on both sides of the business. So now that we now the actual operating costs of the health care industry are far below what their billing practices would have us believe. We also know that a significant portion of our insurance premiums go towards fuelling the operational costs and towards profit margins to boost stock prices of the insurance companies. We can now get an honest quote from the health care industry for total operational maintenance and eliminate the middle man bureaucracy of insurance companies.
So for the sake of argument let’s assume that the cost for operating every hospital, doctors office, clinic, and medical practitioner in our fictitious county is $1 Billion dollars (yes this is a seriously inflated figure but whatever the TRUE cost of operations is you can pretty much be sure that it is more than 30% less than what insurance companies are bringing in now, as they have to cover their exorbitantly paid chief executives as well as an entire staff of tens of thousands of claims processors) . Now let us consider that the population of the county is 500,000 people. We divide the billion dollar costs by the total population and we get $2,000.00 per year per person. If we eliminate the insurance company profit from this figure it falls to $1400.00 per person. Still a very large amount of money, but remember the basis is $1 billion it is very likely that number is extremely high and the final cost may be as little as $200 million which would further reduce that per person cost to $400.00 per person.
What I am basically trying to say is that no one currently has any idea what the true cost of health care is, they just know the current system is very expensive and poorly managed.
The goals are now to discern the bottom line cost of health care. To find ways to reduce that amount even further. To increase the quality of the care you receive. To make sure no one is getting a free ride from honest tax paying citizens.
Many of you are concerned that once government inserts itself into the health care industry quality will plummet. Normally I would say you are correct that is why my plan prohibits government from being involved with the decision making process. You pay your taxes. You get health care. All decisions on your care will fall onto the shoulders of you and your doctors regardless of the costs involved. Also anyone who receives medical care will be required to fill out feedback on their caregivers. This feedback will be used to assess wage evaluations and future budget predictions for the particular facility from which you received care. This would be handled by an independent association of unpaid citizens.
How can we reduce the cost of health care ?
Scholarship programs ! Any prospective student interested in a career in the health care industry should be given 100% free college tuition. Caveats that apply would be the requirement to being a US born citizen. No foreign students would be allowed to participate in the program. There would have to be a certain level of ethical behavior by the student. No arrests. No controversial activities. Obviously a minimum level of grades would have to be maintained. Finally they would have to commit to 15 years of service at wages defined by the local standard of living, no more exorbitant salaries, but yes they would be compensated very well indeed.
By reducing the salaries of medical practitioners you will rapidly drive down the costs of healthcare and as such be able to hire far more doctors, nurses, physician aides and what not. This will rapidly increase the quality of care whilst not inflating the cost of said care.
Further driving down the cost of healthcare will be how illegal aliens treatment is handled. Currently they are treated, at the cost of the taxpayers due to chronic lack of insurance amongst this demographic, they are then allowed to return to society. From now on when an illegal enters a hospital for care they will be given the most basic care to sustain life and then turned over to the INS for immediate deportation. It is assumed that illegal immigrants cost honest citizens more than $250 BILLION in health care costs although this number is questionable due to the fact no one is entirely sure how many illegal aliens are in the country.
There are dozens of other things the country can do to revitalize the health care industry. One thing for certain is that sweeping change is a necessity and that.
There are also hundreds of potential questions I left unanswered for the sake of brevity (too late I know!) an example of which is regarding care whilst travelling on vacation or for business and they are easy enough questions to answer. Hopefully I will receive some excellent feedback on this concept and if so will launch a Part 3 that will handle any questions posed. Thank you for your time
patriotranter
