Pay Less for Health Care
The amount of money we pay for health care is enough to make you sick, especially when you consider how little actually goes to health, especially your own. It doesn’t have to be that way. We could have a smoothly- functioning system that provides health care to everyone, if the government had the will...because there is a way.
The simplest solution to the soaring medical costs is to boil the system down to basics and reconstruct it. Eliminate the corporate profit margin and trim out management redundancy, and then we’ll begin to realize how much we’re being ripped off.
Then, take out the lawyers. The abuse of the current system is breathtaking. Attorneys specialize in extorting insurance companies...threatening expensive court proceedings if the insurance company refuses to settle. Sometimes, but not often, they’ll wind up in a headline-grabbing case that awards some trailer trash a sum equivalent to the gross national product of Botswana.
This is not compensation it is a lottery system, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that insurance companies pay to the lawyers and to the plaintiffs come from your premiums. Worse, this abuse has corrupted the entire judicial system.
Surely, people who need medical repair should get help promptly. They should also be properly compensated for the loss of time and earning ability. But there needs to be a limit on punitive damages paid to the plaintiff. Say, $100-thousand beyond their own actual costs, to reduce the incentive to go to court. And for those doctors and hospitals that need more punishing, they would have to pay larger judgments to the community, not to the individual.
The government needs to take management of the nation’s health care out of the hands of profit-hungry insurance companies, and put it under the control of health care professionals. You don’t buy your car or your house or your children’s education through insurance companies, why your health care? Consider that insurance companies necessarily are making decisions about your health care based on how little you can cost and how much profit they can make.
By putting health care in the hands of health care professionals, you’re letting the primary decisions on care and coverage to be assessed by those on the front lines. If doctors had to determine the actual health and needs of their patients, they would be focused on more prevention and less repair. They would insist on proper nutrition, hygiene and exercise. And by keeping the patients healthy, they would lower the costs of treatment, and thus be able to offer the lowest health care premiums.
Taking this common sense approach would reduce the amount we’re paying for our health care by half, and wouldn’t that make you feel better.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton
.
[Home]
SetonnoteS