The expansion of health insurance and government entitlements created “free money” and thus the explosion of healthcare costs. The solution is simple and “impossible”: we all pay cash.
Here’s why healthcare (a.k.a. sick-care) costs cannot be reduced; the entire system is based on vast pools of “free money.” The corporate-America or union/government employee who goes to the doctor pays a few dollars for a visit and drugs; the “real cost” is of no concern. Ditto the “real costs” charged to Medicare and Medicaid.
The link between the “consumer” of healthcare and the provider has been broken for decades. There is no “free market” in healthcare–there isn’t any market at all. We live in a Kafka-esque nightmare system in which “some are more equal than others” and hundreds of thousands of dollars are lavished on worthless tests, procedures and medications for two reasons:
1. Because there’s “free money” to pay the bills
2. So-called “defensive medicine” in which worthless tests are administered to stave off random (sometimes valid, sometimes nuisance) malpractice lawsuits.
Having a baby cost $30, which is today’s dollars is $244. A private deluxe room cost $23 or $187 in today’s dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s inflation calculator, $1 in 1952 is $8.14 in 2009 dollars.
What does it cost to have a baby now? $10,000? Or is it $25,000? Who even knows?
I know all the reasons why “costs had to skyrocket”: we’re getting so much better care now, right? Actually, as measured by death rates and any other metric you want to select, there is simply no way to justify a 40-fold increase (or is it 100-fold?) in medical care costs. The returns on all the “miracles of modern medicine” are in fact exceedingly marginal– but nobody wants to talk about that.
In 1952, if something awful happened and a patient died, here was the response: “We’re very sorry.” Families weren’t outraged; they expected people to die and interventions were not expected to be miraculous every single time. Doctor Kildaire and all his imitators on TV had not brainwashed the public into reckoning that if someone died, a mistake had been made. They also hadn’t been brainwashed by the mental disorder known as “the American Legal System” into thinking that in every possible circumstance in life, there is liability, and the only question is where to pin it for the big bucks jackpot.
Stories about people suing doctors and hospitals for 5 times the value of a house ($1 million in today’s money would have been $120,000 in 1952, when you could buy a nice house for $20,000) simply did not exist in the 1950s. The cultural mindset that someone somewhere must be at fault and it’s a “right” to go after them did not exist. Since insurance was limited, there was no “free money jackpot” to go after, either.
I know you’re probably outraged at the suggestion that “modern safety nets” of insurance and entitlements are the cause of our ills, but follow this idea through:
With no insurance or government program to bill vast sums, then every clinic, doctor and hospital in the U.S. would instantly go broke. Someone would pick up the pieces for $1 or whatever the auction price happened to be and start charging people $50 for a visit to the doctor–not a “co-pay” which was accompanied by a bill for $500 or $1,500 or $15,000 to an insurance company or the government, but $50 cash–that would be the total cost. People might decide they did not need to see the doctor every time they got the sniffles. They might ask the doctor if an MRI was really going to help diagnose their problem or if it was gilding the lily.
Full Story By Charles Hugh Smith
After reading this I sat and thought about it for a while, Charles hit the nail on the head. The solution is so simple that no one wants to look at it.Not Congress, not the insurance companies, and not Doctors. However I have a strong suspicion that most Doctors would be all for this.
Tags: Health Care