Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
And, just like car insurance, it doesn't cover small maintenance type things. If you get a cold, you need to pay for your own medication. Minor injury? Buy your own bandaids and neosporin.
I don't know what insurance is like in your imaginary world but mine has never covered Band-Aids or DayQuil.
Seriously, your argument is terrible.
Eh. The example was terrible. I was trying to be funny. How about: If you get an ankle sprain, you can probably afford to go see a nurse and have it checked out, verified it's not broken, and have a brace or bandage put on it. Or frankly any minor thing, from a stomach flue, ear ache, minor infections, allergies, dog bites, bee stings, etc, etc. Well, or you could if there was a local private doctors office in your area for these sorts of things, that handles basic care just fine, and charges affordable rates for it. Today, just to see a general practitioner for five minutes of care takes working through a mountain of paperwork, scheduling often weeks in advance, and also involves dealing with your insurance company. Because that GP is part of a large health organization and everything has to be tracked, verified, go through their payment system, checked against various government services, etc, etc, etc.
The overhead is ridiculous. But the alternative is heading to an urgent care or emergency room for those sorts of things. This is why I keep pointing out how dramatically the HMO act changed our entire health care system (and not for the better). Prior to that time, you could just drive your kids to the local GP's office for these things (and some of them even made house calls!). It was a private practice with maybe a few employees. Very little overhead, and 99% of what you needed could be taken care of for you at very little cost (but you paid out of pocket, which is part of what kept the overhead low). If you needed more expensive care, you either went directly to an emergency room (if it was an emergency), or the GP would make a determination that your injury, ailment, or whatever was more serious and refer you (just like they do now, only without the massive overhead in the way of that first step). At that point, you'd enter the world of "covered care", but it was a smaller world and didn't have a massive number of smaller cases clogging it up.
It was efficient and it worked. Very well. What it didn't do was generate massive profits for large monolithic health care organizations who could funnel that money into other large medical devices organizations, or pharmaceutical companies, often in return for kick backs of various kinds (oh hey, Dr so-and-so, in return for padding our profits by unnecessarily using our machine that goes ping on every patient for 30 years, in your retirement years, you can sit on our board as an "advisor", and we'll pay you a high 6 figure salary. Great doing business with you!). But as far as medical bang for your buck? Much much better.
About the only positive thing that can be said for the changes to our health care system since the passage of that act was that in the midst of all that glut of money a decent amount of beneficial medical research has been funded along the way (and yes, some actual useful medical devices and pharmaceuticals as well). I'm pretty sure we could find a more efficient way to accomplish those things though, if we really put our minds to it. Laundering that cost, hidden in a much larger pile of waste, by passing it along to everyone who wants even the most minor health care, has not proven to be a useful a methodology as you might think.