SkydiveRick has left a new comment on your post "Sicko":Where to begin.
It has been proven time and time again that socialized medicine is a bust. Waiting periods go up, quality goes down, and you are still paying for it, but with socialized medicine it is mandatory through your taxes. And on top of that, this idiot Moore was hob-nobbing with anti-American, Communist Castro trying to show how wonderful their system is. It is in shambles. I can't believe you seriously support government run medical care. Government can't even get the basic shit right, and you want to trust them with this too? And don't give me this "I know all about it because of my job" crap. Fucking insane. I have spent a lot of time around the system too. Does it need improvement? of course. It is an imperfect world, and we will tinker and tinker forever, probably, but to put such an important matter into the hands of government is idiotic, not to mention the economic backlash when insurance companies go belly-up as a result.
Well, maybe somebody could help me out. I try to explain to people that when nothing changes on the provider side, nothing will change on the provider side. It perplexes me when I try and make that really clear and people still don't get it. Is it just because they are conditioned to have a knee-jerk reaction to the mention of socialized medicine?
I'm going to and say it again, and if anybody knows a simpler way of explaining it to people who really have an inability to understand cause and effect, I'm all ears.
Virtually all medical care is paid for through contracted health plans of some sort. The fact is, just over 50% of the medical costs are already paid for by the government through Medi-Caid, Medi-Care, VA and DOD. The other half is paid for by for-profit insurance companies, contracted to the providers.
The idea of a single-payer not-for-profit administrator is to simply consolidate the administration and gain the economies of scale. Taking the profit margin out also reduces costs tremendously.
So, here's the question for Rick. In the payer scenario I describe, the providers are still paid exactly as they already are, if not better, how is it possible the quality of care will be adversely affected? Nothing changes from a providers perspective, except they don't have to negotiate with a dozen different health plans nor have the associated costs in office staff.
Whether Moore "was hob-nobbing with anti-American, Communist Castro" is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
Oh.. I know.. an analogy might help. This will make it much simpler for the simple minds.
Suppose you are a carpenter and you make tables. You have 100 customers that you make tables for. Those 100 customers have 20 different insurance companies that pay for the tables you make for the customers. You have a contract with each of those 20 insurance companies for a negotiated rate on a table. Say.. one pays you $500 for a table. Another payes you $480.. an another pays $510, etc. Now, suppose all of a sudden there was only one insurance company. You get a negotiated rate on a table that does not change your gross income for making tables.
How does that effect you as a carpenter in any other way other than reducing the complexity of your receivables management?
In addition, the insurance premiums of the customers actually go down because the profit has been taken out of the system, and because of the consolidation. Heck, why do companies merge? They can lay off staff because they gain the economies of scale, thus the cost of doing business goes down - profits go up. In this case, profits don't go up because there are no profits. The cost of the system goes down.
Finally - just remember that the government already pays for about 50% of the health care costs. That system can be leveraged and consolidated to further improve efficiency. No more state medicaid programs. No more Medi-Care. One government agency does the administration instead of several government agencies, and dozens of insurance companies.
As far as the economic impact of taking the business away from the insurance companies goes, I don't care. They will either adapt or go out of business. It's more important to the citizens of this country to have a more effective system.
So.. back to the loon to make some rational argument why I'm wrong.
2 comments:
I think one "problem" you'll see pointed out by some is that with this system you might end up with more people seeing doctors.
Now I'm all for more people going to the doctor, making sure they're healthy etc. But that will be a change on the provider side.
Is there anyway to abuse this system? Seeing doctors far too regularly? Will there be any reason not to? Will this reduce the care provided to those that are legitimately sick? How do we deal with the increase in patients that would happen with this new plan.
My first guess is that with the cost savings from the ease of use of the governmental plan, that facilities will have funds avail to hire new doctors. Also as demand goes up, the premiums that facilities receive will probably go up, allowing them to staff more that way too.
Maybe you can give some inside info on how that would work.
Steve.
I think people underestimate the fraud that a system like this will incur. Not to mention that it's almost fully automated...wow. Talk about a bullseye...
In any case, I think we can all say we know one hypochondriac. My gf is borderline. How do you deal with people like that? There's a point where it stops being preventative medicine and starts preventing medicine.
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