Quote:
Originally Posted by Blueblaze
Is Medicare Advantage a failed experiment? No more than Medicare or "health" insurance in general.
The moment you expect insurance to pay for anything non-catastrophic, the wheels come off. Just like when people expect their home insurance to buy them a roof when the old one is still there, and then can't figure out why EVERYONE'S insurance quadrupled in three years. Medicare WILL go bankrupt -- and probably in our lifetime. There is simply not enough money in the Gooberment's magic money machine to pay all the crooks who got in line the moment the word got out about Uncle Sam's deep pockets.
My grandfather was insulin-dependent for the last half of his life. The only "health" insurance he ever had was original Medicare -- a pure catastrophic hospitalization policy that he couldn't have afforded on a Coleman lantern assembly line salary. It never paid a dime for his diabetes. Most of his life he had NO insurance. So he paid for his doctor out of pocket. And he bought his insulin out of pocket. And that was possible because everyone else was doing the same thing, so a doctor's visit was only about $5 in the 60's. And his insulin was pennies a day -- back when they had to slaughter pigs to get it, instead of merely growing it in a vat like they do today, using some eternally-patented process, that for some bogus reason costs 1,000 times more than extracting insulin from pig pancreases.
Even my own daughters' well-baby appointments were only $15, back in the '80's. That wasn't the insurance co-pay, because that farce hadn't been invented yet. $15 was the entire bill. My company only provided hospitalization, which only paid the catastrophic costs of a hospital stay, like for when they were born. It didn't pay for doctors, and therefore, doctors were affordable.
And then Blue Cross invented the "HMO", which paid for everything, so long as it was "in-network". And the wheels came off. By the time I retired, my copay was $35 per visit, and I was paying over $350/month for "health insurance", while my company picked up the rest of the tab -- $1200/month. Effectively, $18,000/year of my salary went to pay for health care BEFORE I EVER EVEN SAW A DOCTOR!
Then I retired, 3 years short of medicare, and was forced to go on Obamacare. Since I was considered "wealthy", I was stuck with the entire cost -- $12,000/year for a $10,000 deductible, which left me on the hook for $22,000, before "insurance" paid a dime for a catastrophe that never came. Well, except for the "free" $12,000 annual physical.
But glory be! I finally made it to 65 and government "Medicare Advantage" insurance, courtesy of some crooked insurance company that gets a big cut from the gooberment to tell me which doctors I can see and which drugs I can take. And it only costs us $500/month for the privilege -- at least until Medicare goes belly-up in 10 years.
Reagan was right. The most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help".
The 2nd most terrifying words are "I'm from the Insurance company..."
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I can agree with many of your points here, but five things really are responsible for the explosion of health care costs, in my opinion.
1. There are so many profit centers all over the American healthcare delivery system. It accounts for 1/6 of our entire economy. Many of these profit centers, including the insurance companies, are publicly traded corporations. When you have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, I don’t know how patients can be the number 1 priority.
2. Prescription drug costs are extremely high. We are one of the few countries in the world which allows direct marketing to patients. All those ads cost a lot of money.
3. We have a litigious society and the lawyers want their slice of the healthcare pie.
4. A very legitimate reason is we have added so many new treatments and technologies and it’s all very expensive. We didn’t have a heart transplant until the late 60’s. We didn’t have CT’s and MRI’s and many modern technology. It all comes at a cost.
5. 50% of all healthcare costs go to treat folks in the final year of life. Believe it or not, historically, this was not the case.
There are many more than this, but I think these are the top 5.