Quote:
Originally Posted by BBQMan
djplong - What your grandmother experienced was a tragedy .... You continue to rail against private insurance companies, but both of the procedures were authorized by Medicare, not private insurers. We need to ask if private insurers would have authorized these expenditures or vetoed them until proof of need was established? Medicare does not care. After all, the government is picking up the bill
You ask why medical care is more expensive in the United States than other countries. Let me use Canada as an example. The United States has 25.9 MRI machines per 1,000,000 people. Canada has 6.7. The figures for CT machines is 34.3 vs 2.7. Canada spends less on these tests simply because they cannot deliver the level of service provided in the US. The easiest way to reduce medical costs is to not provide them. I do not disagree that we need to reduce medical costs as a percentage of GDP and must attack the problem. We need to look at all the causes of medical cost inflation. It is worth noting that the explosion in US medical costs started in the 60's when Medicare came into existence.
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The statements I highlighted above in the quote are so telling in all of this mess.
I would add to the last sentence: "and when the patient stopped getting the check for the insurance claim, and it started going directly to the provider/doctor. When patients do not pay the dr. themselves, they have no incentive to look at the costs, nor to question overbillings, nor to look elsewhere for a better price from another provider."
As for djplong's grandmother's horrendous "care", medical care itself depends so much on the individual physician. There are quacks in every area of the country and there are quacks in every profession. Healthcare overall in the U.S. should not be characterized by a quack like that guy. There are also crappy hospitals here and there, but overall, most are not like that one.
I hate to see the excellent doctors and hospitals we've had be characterized and lumped in with charlatans like that.
As for the apparent malpractice done to Grandma, I would much prefer to have the ability to sue for malpractice than to have a single-payer government healthcare system for all, in which there is no ability to sue for malpractice. Does anyone really think the government would provide malpractice insurance for its doctors and other providers? I don't think so.