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Originally Posted by LoriAnn
Education and healthy lifestyle has never stopped one person from ultimately dying. The majority of healthcare spending for any person is during the last 2 years of their life when they are at the end of the disease process that will eventually end their life. Mortality is still 100% and treatment of the dying is expensive even if it's only palliative. The expense will not be impacted just by switching the burden to the state level. Medicare has been the most efficient health care delivery system in the world. Quick payment for service providers and nearly immediate approval for services for Patients. The problem is private insurance. Take a look at the profit of the 10 largest private insurance providers. WellPoint had a profit of 38%. Anthem was higher! If Medicare received all the premiums that the top 10 insurance providers enjoyed, the system would be the most stable in the world. No one should make profit from administrating insurance coverage. The only profit should be at the provider level. Go to a single payor system with Medicare and wipe out the insurance companies profits and the cost of healthcare would be instantly manageable.
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LoriAnn, you wrote: WellPoint had a profit of 38%.
I question the veracity of your informational source. In 2008, WellPoint had an after-tax profit of 4.1% of revenues. That same year the healthcare insurance industry as a whole ranked 35th (out of the 53 identified industries) with a profit of 2.2% of revenue. They were surpassed by both the healthcare facilities industry (34th) and the pharmaceutical industry (ranked 30th) with a meager 3.0% of revenue profit, hardly an enviable number. The before -tax profit of WellPoint in 2013 was 5.4% of revenue, down from 6.2% in 2012. Those numbers seem quite modest to me.
You are proposing a single-payer system. Allow me to offer the following example as one of dozens that could have been chosen: the Department of Energy was formed in 1977, in a large part to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. At that time we imported around 40% of our oil needs. 35 years later, in 2012 we still imported about 35% of those needs and yet, that year, for the first time ever, we produced as much oil as we used. Our oil industry has been able to create those kinds of resources in spite of the government’s contrarian attempts to slow production down.
So I must ask you: do you really want your healthcare needs to be handled by such incompetence? And we must never forget that the efforts driving us to a “single-payer system” are being orchestrated and propagandized by that same inefficient and ineffective bureaucracy.
Remember a few years ago when a politician thought that Exxon’s $40 billion profits were obscene and should be turned over to the government for redistribution? What was never mentioned was that Exxon had paid over 110 billion dollars in taxes that same year or nearly 3 times as much as they made in profit, but that important fact was ignored. That was politics and it was dirty because it misled those who were unaware.
This is not a political statement. Instead it is a statement of facts. It is a statement based on real numbers and it is intended to show that propaganda pieces only sell to those who are unaware.
As Ayn Rand said, “we can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality”.