The Game Is Rigged
For decades, government encouraged us to pay for health care—even routine procedures—with insurance. But insur
ance is designed for large, rare expenditures, like your house catching fire or a heart attack.
When everything from head colds to backaches is paid for through insurance, neither the customer nor service provider pays much attention to what anything costs. I’m on Medicare now. I’m amazed that when I go to a doctor, no one even mentions price.
If we paid for everything that way—clothing, groceries, computers—everything would cost much more. No one would know when to shop around, when they were getting a great deal, or when to say: enough.
The more we enshrine the idea that “everyone must have health insurance,” the more big insurance companies can raise prices without worrying about customers fleeing. Forced government insurance steers everyone into a few big plans instead of letting individuals make decisions that foster competition. Hospitals and insurance companies are the ones really being helped.
It shouldn’t surprise us when big companies start out opposing regulation but then announce that they wholeheartedly support government’s latest “reform.”
By the time legislation is passed, the major players in the industry have had a role in writing the laws, ensuring that they are guaranteed a profit. here….
2 thoughts on “The Game Is Rigged”
If the government would get out of medical care the cost would be cut in half at a minimum. I worked in a pharmacy in 1972 and we filled prescriptions for some nursing home patients. The over the counter retail for the drugs we sold was $3.00 over cost. So a prescription for a $1.00 pill x 30 pills was $33. Those patients in the home who were paying their own bills paid retail. However those who were paying by Medicare were charged what the government said it would pay. For the $1.00 pill Medicare would pay $3.00. So for the patients who were on Medicare the taxpayer paid $3.00 x 30 = $90. My understanding was that if we billed them less Medicare would kick it back and not pay until we corrected the bill.
Get government out of the market and the price goes down.
Kent – You nailed it.