Cutting the cost of healthcare: can we afford it?

[the DRIZZLE]

While insurance companies have shares of the blame but the raising cost has a lot more to do with pharmaceutical company and malpractice. Most of the time it is not the doctor visit that is expensive it is the damn medicines. Why is it that many of the life saving medicine is so expensive that average person is unable to afford it without insurance?

It is Greed, purely human greed and the US patent system and law system. In fact it is because of insurances that the pharmaceutical company dare to charge over inflated price because insurance pay for it, thus lead to raising insurance cost. One may say getting rid of insurance company will solve everything but the price will still remain high because the government will pay for it.

Also, did anyone ever notice the rapid increase of commercial of new drugs on TV? Thus the second problem, it SHOULD be the doctor who decide what medicine to give the patient, not the patient themselves as they are not health care profession. In many cases, the new drugs are a lot more expensive but it is not that much better than the cheaper, older drugs. The way foolish people figure that if the insurance company paid for it, why6 not go for the new and expensive drugs; thus even more strain to the system.

Major self ownage here. Pharmaceuticals are 10% of total healthcare spending.

 

[Naeeldar]

Your attitude sounds like, "I've got mine, F everyone else." It sounds like you were blessed to be born with great interviewing and people skills or some sort of family connections (lucky sperm club) to get your great job. Let me guess, you majored in a marketable field and worked really hard and having good luck and avoiding bad luck played no part in your success, right?

With our nation's huge amount of unemployment and underemployment, there doesn't seem to be much opportunity left. Tell the 17 million people with college degrees who (presumably menial) jobs that don't require a college degree about all of the opportunity that's available. Or tell it to the underemployed PhD scientists and other people who "did everything right".

Yes your right. My high school diploma goes a LONG way into making everything easy for me. I'll admit I was lucky to be born with great interviewing/people skills and when it comes to business I did learn a lot growing up from family and friends. That said I ended up at my current nice job by working my way through other jobs and then excelling at this company when the opportunity opened up. I worked for a gym at age 19 and worked my way up to weekend manager and then a full-time Operations Manager position in 7 months. Have 1.5 years of that I went into retail sales for another year (pool tables, hot tubs etc..). Tried a stint in insurance sales which wasn't for me and so I spent a holiday at Nordstroms. Ended up with an interview option for entry level business sales that January. Impressed the Director during the interview and so he gave me a shot. Worked my ass off blowing out sales records and then ended up in account management. But yes your right everything was given to me and I picked the one major in college that was marketable...

Don't get me wrong I was blessed with good people skills and I was blessed with intelligence, but that hardly means I had things given to me. I worked my ass off and I'm tired of so few people doing that. And I don't mean dealing with grueling tough jobs, I mean working to improve themselves. As an example my uncle a blue collar worker in a powerplant took some night courses for computers to get a promotion at work about 10 years ago.

Are you open to the possibility that you yourself or a loved one could end up broke and in need of health care yet unable to afford it? Even though you think you're really special and that ill fortune could never befall you, it's possible (unless you were born into the lucky sperm club and have wealthy parents). You could lose your position in any number of ways that have nothing to do with your own actions. For example, you could be falsely accused of rape or child molestation or whatever and end up losing your job and career in spite of getting acquitted. Or you could rub an executive the wrong way at some point and end up getting canned and then through bad luck be unable to find another position in your field, rendering yourself unemployable in it after a period of months.

Of course. That's life.. for the most part anyway the false accusation thign is a pretty stupid comment and one in a million. But I also could of been born retarded too. Life is not fair - what's new about that?

And ill fortune could absolutely befall me or my family. It has before and I worked through it, as did my family.

So why aren't the Canadians, French, and British clamoring for the American system? They're terrified of our system and think we're retarded for having it. Wealthy people will always be able to afford and seek out the very best doctors and exquisite treatments. There's nothing unusual about that.

Circular logic. Why don't North Koreans clamor to end their cruel govt? People accept what they know and grew up with. That doesn't make it right.

That's a BS argument that seems to be making the rounds. Other nations have farmers and people living in rural areas. There's no reason why a successful system that works on a small scale can't scale up to handle more people. We have more people but we also have more aggregate money to spend on health care.

Are you trying to argue that a core component of why the U.S. spends 17% of its GDP on health care is one of population density? Are you saying that rural hospitals result in gross inefficiency?

It's funny how two of the evil socialist countries seem to be doing well.

Um yes I am saying rural hospitals result in inefficiency. There is a reason why you can get better treatments in the metropolitan areas. There are million other factors here but the reality is a lot of those socialist countries (I don't consider them evil but I don't want that for my country) are not doing well. Many have been dragged under by their entitlement programs - take a look at Spain and Greece or even Italy as a few examples.

The fact of the matter is thought those countries can barely stay afloat with a much smaller population and yes density plays a HUGE role as well. The US Govt has a hard enough time managing medicare let alone a program FAR FAR larger. People seem to forget that our govt was setup and designed to be inefficient. We are not magically going to lower costs of healthcare with a Universal system. The fact is the majority of Americans are insured (true some arent' but most are) so there isn't efficiency to be gained there. Medicare as an example is not more efficient then other insurances.

Finally you are ignoring the fact that a lot of US dollars goes towards R&D in healthcare. We develop drugs/treatments that other countries get cheaper. Not to say other countries don't do the same but we do it on a far larger scale.

 

[Naeeldar]

Yes, something has to give. We can't continue to spend an ever increasing percentage GDP on healthcare. We can either get less healthcare, or reduce the quality somewhat. For example if we could reduce the quality 5% for a 25% reduction in costs than that looks like a smart move to me. This is part of the reason single payer is cheaper, the quality is lower. You are assuming that the current system of medical training is optimal, it might be unnecessarily long. We should at least examine the issue.

Which is my point. I'm sorry not everybody has healthcare but myself and many others do not want our quality lowered.

 

[mchammer187]

Which is my point. I'm sorry not everybody has healthcare but myself and many others do not want our quality lowered.

other countries do it fine with much less

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
http://www.allcountries.org/ranks/preventable_deaths_country_ranks_1997-1998_2002-2003_2008.html

the problem is how do you measure quality?

the health insurance model is horrible for efficiency because the attitude is if insurance is paying for it than why not opt for the most expensive procedures. The insurance model should be for catastrophic coverage only and we need another model for preventative and routine care.

I strongly recommend anyone that is interested listen to these:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/391/more-is-less
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/392/someone-elses-money

 

[Xellos2099]

Major self ownage here. Pharmaceuticals are 10% of total healthcare spending.

Say that to people who spends hundreds to thousands of dollar on medicine per month...