re: An anecdotal story today why healthcare is so expensive

A big reason healthcare is expensive is that non-profits (non-property-tax-payers) do not abide by medical necessity laws. They waste huge amounts of money and then scream for help from the government.

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There is free ER visits in other countries and their healthcare is way cheaper.

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The standard of care is far lower too.

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The shite is infuriating


I agree….

So, what’s the answer to this problem?

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If they go to the Doctor without insurance the the cost is automatically withdrawn from paycheck. If they don't have a job it's deducted from their welfare benefits.

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Freddy decided he would rather have cable tv.

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Priorities

Yet, you can borrow money in a casino to keep gambling....

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I agree….

So, what’s the answer to this problem?

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People have to understand what's really being discussed when we talk about a health care system and then we all have to make a very difficult choice.

First of all, there's no "fixing" health care. There are three elements: availability, cost/price, and quality. Any improvement in one of those costs you in at least one other element.

For example, increase availability, cost goes up or quality goes down, or both.

So the first thing people have to understand and accept is that there is no "fix," there is only picking your poison.

This idea that the government could "fix" health care, but just won't, is a silly fantasy.

Secondly, people need to wrap their minds around another fact. Probably 70% or more of the common medical interventions in use today only came about within my lifetime (I'm 55). MRIs, CT scans, heart bypasses, angioplasties, and stents, joint replacement surgeries, arthroscopic surgeries, many pharmaceuticals currently in use, cataract surgeries, colonoscopies, laparoscopic surgeries, etc. All were either invented or developed and implemented in widespread use just in my lifetime.

Then if you go back one more generation and add in things that were implemented in widespread use in my parents' generation, that number probably goes to 95%+. Antibiotics (hasn't even been in widespread use for 100 years yet), spinal surgeries, safe C-sections, lots of pharmaceutical discoveries (steroids, ibuprofen, birth control pills, cardiovascular drugs like Proprandalol, etc., all kinds of psychiatric drugs).

Then if you go back one more generation (my grandmother was born in 1909), it gets real close to 100%. We've barely been using insulin for 100 years, for example. When she was born that didn't exist and if you developed diabetes you just died after a few years.

This is the point: we take all of that for granted. When we talk about someone doing what the OP observed, we're talking about someone getting the benefit of technology that is—at the very most—three generations old.

I'm not saying that the idea that every human being should have equal access to that kind of technology simply by virtue of the fact that they are a living human being is necessarily wrong, but I am saying that we take that starting point for granted and don't tend to critically examine it in the context of this discussion.

In other words, do we assume every human being should have access to space travel? That's a bit of an extreme example chosen to illustrate the point, but medicine is now very high-tech and inherently pretty expensive.

The question of who should have access to it and how society allocates those resources should be debated IMO, and right now it's just assumed.

For example, does it really make sense in the context of society to burden the system with paying for an 83 year old to have cancer treatment that costs $100,000 just so PawPaw can live another 3 years? Not saying PawPaw can't have the treatment, but maybe the family or their community (church community or other support community) or a charity needs to pay for it and not the insurance system.

So that's a question we need to answer as a society and that answer will inform how we prioritize the triangle given above.

Finally, people need to understand another triangle. Any time one entity provides a service, a second entity receives it, and a third entity pays for it, both utilization and price will be artificially inflated.

That's true whether that third paying entity is BC/BS or a "single payer" like Medicare. Doesn't matter. Going to a "single payer" system doesn't protect against that one bit.

What it does do is guarantee that the paying entity will counter artificially inflated utilization and price with artificial reduction of payment and availability of services, making the problem even worse. Now there are four artificial pressures on the system instead of just two.

Our healthcare is so expensive because of two specific groups:

Obese Diabetics

Illegal Immigrants

both clog up Hospitals especially the emergency rooms and waste valuable time and resources.

Source for this - neighbor down the street who is a major Hospital CEO here in Atlanta. He told me if they could reject Obese people and Illegal immigrants healthcare costs would plummet.

Nothing new about that. It’s been going on for decades and always drove us crazy when I worked in the ER

Just wait until the OP finds out what illegals going to the ER are costing us.

Open up those borders you racists! Democrats need votes and you need to pay more. Don't like it? Have I called you a racist cult member yet today?

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The guy goes “ yeah I’m not paying that… I’ll just go to the ER down the street “ and he walks out the door

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joke’s on him. He’ll wait 12-14 hours to get seen, and still get a bill from the hospital that gets turned over to collections if you don’t pay. You pay with either money, time, or both.