What is your answer to reducing health costs and improving health care in America?
How do we go about this without drastically increasing out health insurance costs?
Of course we all need to practice healthier lifestyle habits, but fiscally how do we improve our nation? Should we adobt other nation’s practices? if so, whose?
How do we improve health care across america and lower the costs to the citizens who utilize that care?
July 25th, 2010 at 2:55 am
Gather up all the “illegals” and throw them across the nearest border!
IF that happens to be an ocean, so much the better, just take them out beyond the 12 mile limit! MOST won’t be able to swim back!!
July 25th, 2010 at 2:56 am
It’s really a no brainer.
1. Only provide insurance that covers catastrophic problems, not the office visits and other things like check ups, etc. Would you buy car insurance that covers tune ups? Of course not. Auto insurance would cost a fortune to provide that kind of insurance.
2. Take the task of health care out of any government agency. Government is not about our health, only politics and power. Any government plan is going to be designed to get votes and put money into politicians hands by extracting the money from people with money. This ultimately always ends up costing the average guy more.
3. Allocate any money that is given to drug companies to be divided to provide money for alternative medicine solutions and create a competition to solve problems.
4. Stop allowing anchor babies to be U.S. citizens. Create heavy fines and penalties to any company that hires ANY illegal alien.
5. If we are going to make doctors responsible for their actions, we need to give them the authority to request necessary tests, but not require them to do unnecessary tests just to satisfy a lawyer’s accusations that ALL TESTS WERE NOT done, so the doctor is liable for negligence.
6. Make Pharmaceutical companies liable for any damage done by vaccinations they produce, instead of the public that is now paying the billions for this. If they can’t make them safe, they pay, not us.
7. Create real change in Washington and fire the whole lot of those lunatics that think we, the public are stupid and believe their spending lunacy is good for the country. People like Harry Reid, Hilary Clinton, Obama, Nancy Pilosi, the whole lot of those lunatics.
good luck
July 25th, 2010 at 3:41 am
Everyone on public assistance should have copays and limits the same as those
that have to pay their medical costs. This would reduce the number of folks misusing
emergency services both ambulances and emergency rooms. It would also help reduce the number of dollars wasted on unnecessary and unused medications. I recently heard a young mother of 3 say they thought they’d just have another baby, after all it’s free! Free for who I would like
ask? Next we need stricter limits on lawsuits to help eliminate unnecessary testing and
treatment that is done to avoid such lawsuits.
July 25th, 2010 at 4:35 am
The problem in the US is not so much that we need to improve the quality of our healthcare. Overall we have the best doctors who go through the longest and most advanced training in their specialties and sub-specialties. Foreign politicians who become severely ill actually come to the United States for health care, so there is little doubt we have pretty much the best healthcare in the world.
The reason Americans are beginning to doubt the quality of our healthcare is not because of healthcare itself. It is because of how healthcare is provided. However, even though our system is broken, we simply should not make any dramatic changes because it would be risky and dangerous. So to answer your question, we should NOT immediately adopt another nation’s healthcare provider system.
Here is a list of problems that is killing our health insurance system right now:
1. For the past 20 years, insurance companies have been cutting physicians’ salaries. As a result, hospitals and clinics lose money, and patients are being billed higher for the expenses.
2. Poorer families cannot afford health insurance, so they show up at the hospital and cannot pay the costs out of pocket, so doctors and nurses end up providing their services without charge, and hospitals lose money. When hospitals lose money because a patient does not have health insurance, the expenses are higher for those people with health insurance. Politicians are talking about how patients are being denied by private insurers for having pre-existing conditions. But here’s the reality: If insurance companies are required to admit patients with pre-existing conditions, then an uninsured patient can just wait until he gets sick to get insurance, go to the hospital and get treated, and then simply drop the insurance plan. In that case the patient will get healthcare essentially for free, and then insurance companies lose money.
3. Doctors are being sued more than ever. Some patients find any little reason to sue a physician–thinking that all doctors are rich, which is not true–just to get some extra cash. Remember that a jury decides whether a doctor is held accountable, so suppose an ob-gyn is accused of a miscarriage. The doctor might not even be at fault, but the jury will feel sympathy for the family who has lost a baby, and they probably won’t even think about the details of the case and automatically decided that the doctor is guilty. The average lawsuit in 2005 was $3.5 million, and an estimated 30% of the award money goes to the lawyer, which we simply do not need. True, when a physician is sued, his malpractice insurance will cover it, but when every week a doctor in the state of Georgia is being sued, the insurance companies lose money. As a result, all doctors (even those who have a perfect practice history) have to pay higher malpractice premiums. The average obstetrician-gynencologist in 2005 paid $105,000 for malpractice insurance alone. It is estimated that 30% of all healthcare costs go to medical malpractice (A.K.A. preventive medicine). When malpractice premiums increase, doctors’ salaries have to increase to make up the difference, and the cost of healthcare therefore increases as well.
I have just listed three reasons why healthcare costs are increasing. This is the combination of these three factors that healthcare costs are rising higher than inflation. But remember, healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, technicians) are not profiting from this. It is the insurance companies and medical malpractice lawyers who are profiting. Below are a list of corresponding solutions to the issues I listed above:
1. We do not necessarily need a government public health option. In fact, that may actually serve to our disadvantage because look at social security, the postal service, and any other failed government business. What we need is regulation in the private insurance companies. Insurance companies should be required to cover all medical expenses for any hospital, clinic, physician, nurse, and any other healthcare employee. That way, healthcare workers do not lose money, and patients’ expenses do not have to increase because of it; insurance companies will actually do their job.
2. ALL Americans NEED to be insured. We do not need a public plan, but if a family cannot afford health insurance, the government should give them the money to buy it. It may sound like welfare or socialism, but this is the only choice. Even if we give money to every American to purchase healthcare, it will still be a lot cheaper than starting a government insurance company. So in order to insure all Americans, just give them the money to purchase it, and the problem is solved. Since every patient is insured, insured patients do not have to pay increased costs because of someone else who was not insured.
3. We need tort reform. It may hurt patients, but if we do not regulate medical malpractice lawsuits, then even more patients will be hurt by increased costs.
July 25th, 2010 at 5:09 am
The main cause of the health care price and service crisis is already health insurance and government care.
TOO MUCH INSURANCE
If government mandated that we all have “full coverage” car insurance, that paid for predictable and minor service like oil changes, gasoline, and car washes, and that we’d be punished by taxes on the pay if we turned it down, then the price of car insurance would go through the roof, both because it would work as a middleman to cover things we were definitely going to do, and because mandating anything makes its suppliers raise their prices.
Meanwhile, the price of oil changes, gasoline, car washes, et cetera, would go through the roof as well, because the consumer would no longer be in charge of deciding what those are really worth.
The same would happen if government took over paying for the maintenance of poor people’s cars.
What we need to do is get rid of the government mandate that people have full coverage insurance through employers. People, just like in the car insurance scenario above, have TOO MUCH insurance already.
If the politicians really think we need to be forced to have some kind of health care protection, instead of leaving us free to do it ourselves, then it should at least be:
MEDICAL SAVINGS ACCOUNTS
A medical savings account is when, instead of a tax break to hire a middleman insurance company to pay your bills, you get to put the money directly into the bank, yourself, to use on health care.
Right now, your normal, fixed, and minor health care expenses each year probably add up to a few hundred dollars, perhaps a thousand or two at the most, if you have a family. But your health INSURANCE bill, whether paid by you or the employer, is probably between two and ten times that much.
You should be free to simply put the price of the health insurance in the bank, instead, and pay your own bills. You get “catastrophic insurance” in case you have a car accident or get cancer…because it’s unlikely, it costs a fraction of full coverage, and you save the rest.
With yourself in control of your normal health care, you can choose your own doctor, and you can control what the cost is…which will rapidly drive costs down, and force doctors to be responsive to your needs.
Of course, we also need:
LAWSUIT REFORM
Not just for health care, but all things. Lawyers stealing money from anyone with deep pockets is one of the greatest burdens of irresponsibility on our society.
And, while we’re at it:
DEREGULATE TREATMENT
If there is a cure for cancer already discovered right now, the FDA may demand anywhere between five and twenty years to approve it. The chickenpox vaccine took 20 years.
And for every year the FDA bans people from choosing to use that cure, perhaps one million people will be killed by that ban…in effect, murdered by the FDA.
We have a right to choose our own treatment. The FDA’s original function was as a consumer protection agency that simply let us know what it liked, not banned us from what it did not yet know about. You are legally allowed to use tooth paste not approved by the American Dental Association, but most of use CHOOSE to only buy toothpaste with the ADA symbol on it. That is how the FDA was made to work.
Already, you could count all of the treatments that the FDA has eventually approved, and how many people died per year before each one, and the FDA has cost millions of lives.
END MONOPOLY GRANTS
Likewise, the insanity of companies being granted government-mandated monopolies on chemicals is insane, creating the situation where drugs are sold for over one hundred times what it costs to make them.
Simply restoring our natural right to order those drugs from outside the country would be a start, but ultimately we need to end the granting of monopolies for things like the genes in our own bodies, or chemicals anyone could make, or actions we might take.
ALL monopolies are bad, for the same reasons as the ones we use to ban monopolies in oil, operating systems, et cetera.
July 25th, 2010 at 6:02 am
The US healthcare system is set up to benefit the drug manufacturers.
They’ve actually managed to get a federal law stating that it’s illegal to say that any natural substance can cure a disease, and that the only thing that can cure disease is either drugs or surgery.
This is plainly not true, or such vitamin deficiency diseases as scurvy, pellagra, and beri beri would not exist.
Doctors have been educated lately in the best ways to make their patients give the maximum amount of money to the drug companies, and that seems to be their priority. We need to take a look at the British system of health care.
For example, I have ulcerative colitis, which produces massive diarrhea. The doctor’s solution to this was a prescription for Asacol, which cost me $400 per month in 2000, and is probably even more expensive now. It did help just a little, but didn’t really do much good. I still had embarrassing problems.
Luckily, I ran into a friend who had a similar problem when he lived in England. Doctors there prescribe balanced electrolytes, which are in powder form and are absorbed sublingually. This is unbelievably effective! Because of my friend’s tip, I now take a multimineral at a cost of less than $10 per month, and have total relief from the problem.
The US healthcare system really needs a complete overhaul with special attention to the needs of patients rather than with an eye toward how much money drug companies can make.
The percentage of times I’ve been either harmed by a doctor, or a doctor has tried to harm me is alarmingly high. High enough that I don’t want to go to a doctor anymore unless I seriously think that I have a fatal or very serious problem.
In one case, an alkaline phosphatase test came back with bad results. It turns out I have Pagets disease, but the doctor insisted that I have a rare liver disease, and did everything in his power to prevent me from seeing another doctor, while at the same time insisting that I had to see another doctor about it, finally joined with a second doctor to insist that I HAD to take a test (which the doctor explained would not help me in any way, or affect the treatment she wanted to give me) which, due to severe allergies, would have been fatal. Reassurances that they would “give me a Benedryl or something” for anaphalactic shock were somehow not reassuring. The only reason I can think of to give me a test for liver disease when there was nothing wrong with my liver is that the test is expensive.
When a brilliant doctor actually did recognize that I had Pagets, the doctor I was sent to to treat it finally refused to treat me because I wouldn’t take medicine that I’d already tried and found life threatening. He said that he “didn’t think he could responsibly prescribe” anything that wouldn’t be fatal.
Yes, I agree that the insurance system needs an overhaul, but the healthcare system itself needs it even more, and the top priority needs to be the patients, not the drug companies and doctors.
July 25th, 2010 at 6:05 am
It’s simple. Single-payer 🙂