No. of Recommendations: 2
We pay a ton of money for health care because we pay a ton of money for health care.
Let's pose a hypothetical
Assume that the sales pitch of the health care industry is, literally,"your money or your life". Given that sales pitch, would a "JC", of either a hospital company, or an insurance company, tell you it is his fiduciary duty to probe for an upper limit of how much a person will pay to keep himself alive, to "maximize shareholder value"?
Let's further assume that, to maximize the number of people patronizing private insurance companies and commercial hospitals, the government run option is intentionally made as awkward, frustrating, and unremunerative as possible, so that all the interested parties want to avoid it.
What happens under those assumptions? The sheep follow the lead that "big gummit death panels" need to be avoided, at any cost, while the for-profit interests let their costs balloon, because they know they can pass the cost on, with a markup for profit, to patients and premium payers?
I would love to seem someone with deep knowledge of the operations of the French system, as an example, to inform this discussion with why French doctors report better job satisfaction. How do they avoid the administrative overhead and bureaucracy that adds to costs and aggravation in the US system? Why the French system suffers dramatically lower losses to fraud. Why the French system provides better outcomes than the US system, at dramatically lower cost?
If we simply accepted "it is what it is", for everything, we would still be a British colony.
Steve
