As I previously have explained, I believe that healthcare is one area that the government can do more effectively and than private insurance carriers. In the short term, it will cost more (especially in the short term) to convert to a government-run system, but in the long term it will save money. In the long term, there is no acceptable reason that we shouldn’t be able to cut our costs by at least 50% while increasing the quality of medical care and covering everybody. And I mean that literally.
But we shouldn’t just blame insurance companies for the high costs. How about providers for requesting more office visits than is needed, or for providing opioids when a cheaper – and more effective substitute – such as medical marijuana would suffice? How about surgeons for performing unnecessary surgeries when rehab would be cheaper and more effective. How about attorneys for the high cost of medical malpractice insurance which ultimately gets passed on to the buyer? How about juries for ridiculously huge awards for physician malpractice? How about hospitals for spending fortunes for obtaining the ability to provide quality health care for any type of medical care – when they should instead just say “We recommend ABC Hospital for this procedure”.
And perhaps most important, how about politicians (and voters) for not addressing the many problems for the high cost of healthcare (including some I mentioned above) and who instead rely on ambiguous slogans such as “tweak Obamacare” or “use private markets”. We have got to do better. Much better….
Zreebs @ Politicaldog101…
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