Universal Healthcare
So, it seems that Washington is heading down the road of mandatory insurance for healthcare. How will that work? How will you force the homeless to buy healthcare? What will you do if someone refuses,put them in jail, send them to Vietnam? What happens with pensions that include healthcare? Is that just lost? Is it turned into cash? And most important, how much money are the insurance companies pouring into this disaster.
Insurance in healthcare is a really bad idea. Let’s look at the history. We have insurance in healthcare because in WWII Washington froze wages, so industry offered healthcare in order to attract and keep employees. Healthcare costs got out-of-hand. So insurance companies stepped in to control the cost of healthcare. Since then we’ve lost house calls and doctors have been forced to spend less and less time per patient. Now a doctor cannot spend more than 8 minutes with you because that’s all the insurance will pay for. For the last 20 years insurance companies have been refusing coverage for pre-existing conditions. They won’t be able to do that in universal healthcare so ……guess what….. the premium will be going up …. and up. Employers have been offering less and less coverage because the cost keeps going up. And I hope you don’t think things will get better because the government is getting into the healthcare business. Yea right, when did that ever happen?
So what should we do? First outlaw healthcare insurance and malpractice lawsuits. Doctors make mistakes, but that should be handled by a much more efficient arbitration system. Then return doctors billing to a “pay what you can afford” system. It is historically cheaper for the patient and more lucrative for the providers. Insurance companies burn 30% of healthcare premiums as operations and profit. Malpractice insurance is so high in some fields that providers can no longer stay in business. Getting the insurance industry out of healthcare will cut healthcare costs in half, easily. The “pay what you can afford” system will reconnect providers and patients, a relationship that has been severely eroded by the healthcare insurance model.
But I’m just whistling in the wind. Nobody, but nobody will ever challenge the insurance industry. They are the 600 pound canary. 