Is the Medicalcare System still a disaster in US?

The state of Medical care in the US is pretty much a disaster (unless you're rich or have a good-paying job from a major corporation or the government that covers your medical expenses) and it's something that I'm sure I'd spend more time talking about on this blog. While the issue is often presented as greatly complicated, Medical care is really quite a simple concept. Medical insurance is a pretty simple concept-individuals pooling their resources so that when one of their numbers falls ill, he or she can afford to pay for treatment. That's really all it boils down to. (The only real question here should be whether the managers of those pooled resources are entitled to place their own interests-i.e., profits-above the needs of the insured.) A kidney transplant or open heart surgery costs a fortune. Several years pay, for most people. You can't set aside 10 or 15 or 20% of your life earnings for an unforeseen medical crisis, not when you've got bills to pay and a house to buy and kids to provide for and college loans to pay off, and perhaps even elderly parents with medical problems (not covered adequately by their insurance) to help financially. The thing is, not everyone will need such an expensive procedure. Lots of people never have a stroke and spend 20 days in ICU and another 3 months in the hospital, or crash their motorcycle and need emergency spinal surgery and a motorized wheel chair for the rest of their lives. Which is why procedures that cost 3 or 4x more than any one individual pays into the insurance fund are affordable; other people who pay more than they get back make up for it? That's why it's called insurance; it's there if you need it, but you hope that you won't. And oddly enough, it's about the only investment that people are happy not to get their money's worth out of it. After all, would you rather have a near-fatal heart attack and get back more than you paid in, or not have that heart attack at all? So what's Bush's solution? Who needs Medical insurance? We'll just give you a tax cut so you can save up money for your own medical needs! We're a self-reliant nation, after all! Working together as a society-that's socialism! Like the godless Canadians have! Hell, why don't you just study up and perform your own appendectomy, while you're at it? Given the rate of savings in this country, and the state of the actual economy, most people might manage to save just about enough money for a single MRI. If they're lucky. After that, it's back to the emergency room, I guess. I'd think it's fairly obvious that in a country where the average person (Democrat or Republican) is juggling about $5k in credit card debt and living in a house they really can't afford while trying to figure how they'll be able to pay for their kid's text books, much less tuition, the percentage of regular people who can actually take advantage of a tax credit to save for their own medical crisis is fairly low. And that most of the people who can are very rich people, much like the president and all of his closest friends, family members, and high ranking Republican supporters and donors. Not that I'm implying this is anything other than a complete coincidence. The evil socialist solution to the Medical care (cost) crisis is a hot discussion these days. Something like the Canadian system (or something similar, like what they have in virtually every European nation), where they have single payer insurance, i.e. a system of Medical care run by the government and funded by the tax payers. The primary benefit of this, besides universal coverage, is that with a single payer (the government) all of the individual drug companies and hospitals and other such Medical care providers have to negotiate with them, and this drastically lowers prices for services. That's why prescription medications in Canada cost a fraction of what they do in the US. It's also why big pharmaceutical companies give millions of dollars to the Republicans and Democrats in the US to be sure that things stay just the way they are. Not that I'm implying that this is anything other than a complete coincidence. The other major benefit of single payer insurance is that all of the parasitical middlemen (i.e. insurance companies) would be driven out of business, and the billions of dollars they earn in "profits" would vanish, returning to the consumer's pockets and going to the government fund to pay for more treatments for sick people, and probably also going to doctors to pay off their student loans and earn them better livings. I've never seen a full cost break down, but it seems to me that the whole thing would save money just by eliminating the profit motive for insurance companies, not even factoring in the billions lower costs of medications and treatments would save. Of course there'd need to be a great increase in the size of government to administrate it all, and taxes would pay for their salaries, and conservatives are steadfastly opposed to increasing government, unless it's the parts of government that blow things up or spy on US citizens. The other huge money saver would be getting poor people insured. As you often read news stories about; poor people without insurance can't get preventative care, and have to wait until they have some huge emergency, at which point they end up in an emergency room, rack up $10k in expenses to fix something that a prescription would have cleared up six months previously, and stick the tax payers or the hospital with the bill, since they can't pay it, and they don't have Medical insurance. Like the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that holds true for most things in life. It's just that prevention requires intelligence and foresight and logic and planning, and those are things in short supply in all levels of government at this time. One downside (sort of) is that in theory, many of the private insurance companies would be combined or would volunteer to become the new branch of government that ran the Medical care insurance system for the nation, so the loss of jobs from that wouldn't be enormous, and you'd have people who already had years of denying expensive treatment until it was too late moving right into their new civil service jobs doing the same thing for tax payers. But since the net result would be far fewer people doing the same amount of work, with all of the redundancies removed, there would still be quite a few ex-Medical insurance industry employees who would have to find honest work. Most private companies spend a lot of time and money organising their own Medical insurance system, or negotiating with HMOs over the non-treatment and non-payment of their employees, and you know they'd be overjoyed to just turn the whole thing over to the government. It would remove a headache for them, and employees would probably get more per paycheque also, since they wouldn't be paying for the very expensive private Medical care they are now. Of course to make any of this happen would take enormous political clout and popular support. Clinton tried it when he first took office, but the combined lobbying might of the insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical industries, together with a blitzkrieg of very effectively-misleading commercials killed public support to the point that the craven, industry-owned dogs we call congressmen could vote against it and get away with it. It would also require short term expenses for long term savings, and that's something that the current US government, run entirely by short attention span, dessert first-ers is entirely incapable of, as well as steadfastly-opposed to. Bush certainly sets the example with his new programs and tax cuts that are okay now, but become incredibly expensive years after he's out of office, but those are all approved by congress as well, since they well know the attention span of the US public is even shorter than theirs. Tell the people what they want to hear and postpone the bill, and you'll go far in politics. Balanced budgets and taxes to cover your expenses are simply out of the question in the current "that's what credit cards are for" mindset of our culture. When this changes and if it takes a turn to a colossal financial crisis to change, it is an issue that most economists spend their time debating. And the same goes for the Medical care system, though it's hard to imagine just how broken it will have to be before anyone cares enough to fight powerful industry foes to fix it. Blue Cross Blue Shield Medical Insurance | AARP Medical Insurance | Aetna Medical Insuranc | Small Business Medical Insurance | Temporary Medical Insurance | Health Medical Insurance | Blue Shield Medical Insurance | Business Medical Insurance | Guardian Medical Insurance | Medical Insurance For Self Employed | Oregon Medical Insurance | Major Risk Medical Insurance | Kaiser Medical Insurance | Catastrophic Medical Insurance