Fort Wayne Libertarian Mike Sylvester has a good post on the healthcare crisis. Some of his stats:
Healthcare costs are rising 8 – 10% per year and are projected to rise at that rate through 2010.
For 2005 the cost of a comprehensive healthcare plan was $11,480 for a family of 4 for one year.
. . .
The United States currently spends 16% of the entire National GDP on healthcare. This will grow to 20% by 2015. The United States spends the HIGHEST percentage of GDP in the world on healthcare. 2nd and 3rd are Germany and Switzerland at 11% of GDP. In relative terms, we spend 1.5 times as much as the next most expensive country per capita on healthcare. Also please remember that EVERYONE in Germany and Switzerland have free healthcare of some sort.
In the U.S. we spend more and get less than just about anyone in terms of healthcare. We have all the bureaucracy of a government system without the equity that usually comes along with it.
Some links to past healthcare entries in this blog:
I was at Networld / InterOp in 2005 and listened to John Chambers (CEO of Cisco Systems) give a keynote about the directions Cisco was heading. The one area he focused on more than any other was healthcare.
One stat he showed on the screen made me shudder. According to Cisco, over 78% of the cost of healthcare in the US is PAPERWORK. Paperwork from the doctor’s office to the insurance comapany. Processing that paper. Paper from the insurance company to the customer and back again. Then paperwork from the insurance company to the doctor’s office. Repeat again and again. That just blows the mind.
That means that all of the expensive equipment, all of the medical salary, all of the fancy hospital buildings come out of that remaining 22%. People have been talking about automation of this process for at least 10 years, what is taking so long? Can you imagine what kind of care we could offer at 11% of our GDP to everyone if we automated that process (or elminated it?).
I suspect, without knowing, that all that paperwork benefits someone — most likely the insurers. If they can avoid or delay paying a claim because of paperwork issues, that’s more money in the bank for them.
The paperwork is pretty overwhelming. Frequently I will prescribe a medication, only to have the insurer refuse to cover it. This is usually followed by me filling out a pagelong form. If they don’t change their mind, then I dial a number, wait 10-15 minutes on hold, and then explain myself again. They then may require the patient to try a lesser medication which they pay for. If it doesn’t work, then the rest of that medication gets put in the back of the medicine cabinet after the insurer finally relents and pays for the medication I originally prescribed. There was a lot of this runaround before, and the Medicare Part D doubled or tripled it.
If someone misses three days of work due to illness, I have to fill out Family Leave Medical Act (FMLA) forms for his employer. The form is 4-6 pages long. Multiply that by how many people might have a three day illness in flu season.
Regarding single-payer plans– I would have to see the specifics and how they would affect my income. I personally think I’m worth what I’m making. But I recognize that our citizens are getting a poor overall value for the healthcare dollars being spent. At the top end, our healthcare is unsurpassed. But there is a lot of waste and a lot of uninsured. My experience with the government as the payer, however, is that they tend to balance the books by cutting my salary. Medicare had planned to cut physician reimbursement by something like 8% per year for three or four years running. Meanwhile, they decided that negotiating for lower drug prices was something they shouldn’t do. And of course there are a lot of CT scans, etc., done more to avoid losing lawsuits than practicing good medicine. If a single-payer system required less tests to be done, then I would want the payer to share some of the financial risk that that entails.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think physician compensation is what’s driving up healthcare costs. My understanding is that physician compensation has been more or less for a couple of decades while healthcare costs have soared.
• Nationwide, medical school enrollments are down almost 17 percent over the past ten years. Point: In the future there will be fewer and less qualified doctors to serve an anging population. Indiana has a vested interest in becoming a physician-friendly state to attract the best and brighest.
• We have too much health insurance. It’s akin to insuring your car for oil changes, as Eric Schansberg pointed out in his second debate. The cost of insurance would be reduced if it were used for catastrophic needs. Let the patient pay for doctor visits out of pocket.
• Contrary to conventional wisdom, private insurance cost corporations less that group insurance. Reason? When employees are allow to purchase private insurance, they buy less coverage and pocket the difference. Group insurance cost less “per unit,” but it’s a penny-wise, pound-foolish illusion.
• Health care co-ops (not the same as insurance) charge less than $40/month for coverage up to $125,000 per incident. Why so cheap? Not so much paper work.
• Medicaid continues to pressure physicians. Indiana removed about 11,000 patients from the medicaid role, one sued and the feds made the state reinstate most of those who were removed.
Good points, Kenn. A lot of people think their health insurance is a subscription. They forget the protection it provides for cases of catastrophic injury, and set about trying to get more services and medications than they paid in premiums. It’s human nature that they do so. But it really drives prices up.
The North Carolina Board of Medicine disenfranchised all Carolinas American citizens from the American health system that have Lyme Disease. Little is known or talked about with regard to Lyme but the bacteria responsible for this disease is a spirochete. Tuskegee should be ringing bells in your head. Syphillis was a bacterial spirochete. The name spirochete implies shape and in this case, picture an auger and imagine all the tissues , bones, muscles, etc it can bore into and hide.
The College of Rheumatology claims this disease and neither tests for it nor treats it. They asked the Infectious Disease Society to write some very restrictive inhumane guidelines which carry a disclaimer that the physician should use their own clinical judgement.
Then medical boards across the country started hauling in docs that treat lyme . Most cases of lyme are late stage because docs are doing such a poor job testing for the disease.
I have been a traveling ICU nurse all across America and never once seen this written in any charts and I have never heard the diagnosis considered even in unknown sepsis cases. No one looks for it nor do they treat it. Most patients with lyme have been labeled MS, Lupus, Reactive arthritis, fibromyalgia- which by the way is a symptom, chronic fatigue- again a symptom not a true diagnosis. All results of testing and treating on these diseases are scewed because patients really do not meet the clinical guidelines.
Then Blue Cross Blue Shield got in the act( or was it first is the question)… and now they sue doctors for fraud for treating lyme anyway but besides these ineffective inhumane standards that do not provide for any treatment failures.
Blue Cross Blue Shield no longers covers Lyme Disease. Which disease is next? Lots of treatments don’t work for things and with the logic the NC Board of medicine is using… watch out. Insurance will become a thing of the past as will western organized medicine.
I’ve learned most of it is based on absolute rubbish and lies and opinions of single sourced research
One better reason for opposing it: Individual liberty