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UMUR
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: October 19 2007
Location: Denmark
Status: Offline
Points: 3069
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Posted: September 21 2012 at 02:12 |
Atavachron wrote:
I've not known many people - if any - who go to the hospital for a runny nose. Unless one is a hypochondriac, hospitals are no fun for anyone.
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Exactly! I think itīs a very small percentage of the population thatīll abuse the system. I donīt know anyone who out of free will, is interested in spending time at a hospital (or a clinic for that matter). To most people hospitals/clinics are dreadful places.
Edited by UMUR - September 21 2012 at 02:14
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The T
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: October 16 2006
Location: FL, USA
Status: Offline
Points: 17493
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 23:11 |
I know of some people going to the doctor for things like the common cold. Besides that, nowhere but in the US have I noticed that doctor's offices have usually the amount of administrative staff usually required to run entire transnational corporations. I see more people doing administrative and insurance-related stuff in doctors' offices than doctors and nurses. I'm quite sure some of the extra cost of everything goes into that. I'm not sure when the thing stopped being a doctor-nurse-assistant relation and became one where there's about 34983 people you have to go through before or after you see the physician.
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Atavachron
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: September 30 2006
Location: Pearland
Status: Offline
Points: 65249
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:58 |
thellama73 wrote:
Depends on the policy. There are plenty that allow for unlimited such visits with a minimal marginal cost.
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In other words they pay for it.
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thellama73
Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: May 29 2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 8368
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:57 |
stonebeard wrote:
I do not know people that go to the doctor for a common cold. That's because a person's medical business is their own and I don't inquire and they don't offer. |
I make all my friends fill out a medical history form before I will associate with them.
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stonebeard
Forum Senior Member
Joined: May 27 2005
Location: NE Indiana
Status: Offline
Points: 28057
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:52 |
I do not know people that go to the doctor for a common cold. That's because a person's medical business is their own and I don't inquire and they don't offer.
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thellama73
Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: May 29 2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 8368
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:52 |
Depends on the policy. There are plenty that allow for unlimited such visits with a minimal marginal cost.
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Atavachron
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: September 30 2006
Location: Pearland
Status: Offline
Points: 65249
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:47 |
If they have insurance it certainly does cost them, or comes out of their paycheck.
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thellama73
Collaborator
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Joined: May 29 2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 8368
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:43 |
Atavachron wrote:
thellama73 wrote:
I know lots and lots of people who go to a physician for the common cold. | I doubt that very much. The flu maybe.
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Doubt it all you like. It's true. They have insurance and it doesn't cost them anything, so why not go?
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: December 30 2007
Location: Raeford, NC
Status: Offline
Points: 32524
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:30 |
Atavachron wrote:
thellama73 wrote:
I know lots and lots of people who go to a physician for the common cold. | I doubt that very much. The flu maybe.
| I also know such people.
However, I also know of employers (and schools) who require a doctor's note.
I of course don't understand that. If I have a virus, I stay home, but do not go to the doctor. Why should I have to provide a doctor's note?
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Atavachron
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: September 30 2006
Location: Pearland
Status: Offline
Points: 65249
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:24 |
thellama73 wrote:
I know lots and lots of people who go to a physician for the common cold. |
I doubt that very much. The flu maybe.
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: December 30 2007
Location: Raeford, NC
Status: Offline
Points: 32524
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:20 |
You have to understand, it's not just the people going to the hospital or doctor more often that makes it more expensive.
Doctors have to increase personnel for filing insurance claims.
Doctors have more of an incentive to run more tests so they won't be sued.
All this translates into higher costs for everyone.
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thellama73
Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: May 29 2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 8368
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:14 |
I know lots and lots of people who go to a physician for the common cold, despite the fact that he can literally do nothing for them other than write prescription for a medicine no more effective than something you can get over the counter. They just want someone to hold their hand and tell them it's going to be all right.
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Finnforest
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: February 03 2007
Location: The Heartland
Status: Offline
Points: 16913
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:11 |
I said clinic, not hospital. And runny nose didn't mean just runny nose, which I think you know. It meant lots and lots of little things that people don't really need, but take, because it is "covered."
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Atavachron
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: September 30 2006
Location: Pearland
Status: Offline
Points: 65249
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 22:09 |
I've not known many people - if any - who go to the hospital for a runny nose. Unless one is a hypochondriac, hospitals are no fun for anyone.
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: December 30 2007
Location: Raeford, NC
Status: Offline
Points: 32524
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 21:59 |
Finnforest wrote:
That is so awesome Rob. I felt the same with my Dad. I watched as he
suffered through several months of high cost "professional care", and I
conclude that we did better for him when we brought him home to die,
caring for him as a family. You read my story. It wasn't easy and it
took the resolve of his wife and kids, but I've learned doctors are not
Gods and hospitals/nursing homes are not necessarily the best options for people.
We
need to change our entire way of thinking about health care and
personal responsibility. We need to find a way back to paying for care
ourselves up until a reasonable cap, and reducing the cost of
procedures to something resembling sanity. No, no one should lose their
savings because they contract a bad disease. But on the flip side, we
should not have a system which provides "free" care for every person who
thinks their runny nose necessitates a clinic visit, doctors, tests,
and drugs. But we won't because some believe health and education
problems are solved only by dumping ever more money into endless pits in
the name of equality, regulation, and credential-ism. And you'll never
convince them otherwise.
| I'm so with you Jim.
Your story still resonates with me and is changing me. I even rejected one box of cereal in favor of a different one.
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: December 30 2007
Location: Raeford, NC
Status: Offline
Points: 32524
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 21:50 |
thellama73 wrote:
Have you thought about growing a moustache, Rob? It looks like you could have a good one.
| I had a small beard for a few years:
And I was badass with it too.
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thellama73
Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: May 29 2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 8368
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 21:41 |
Have you thought about growing a moustache, Rob? It looks like you could have a good one.
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Finnforest
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: February 03 2007
Location: The Heartland
Status: Offline
Points: 16913
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 21:36 |
That is so awesome Rob. I felt the same with my Dad. I watched as he
suffered through several months of high cost "professional care", and I
conclude that we did better for him when we brought him home to die,
caring for him as a family. You read my story. It wasn't easy and it
took the resolve of his wife and kids, but I've learned doctors are not
Gods and hospitals/nursing homes are not necessarily the best options for people.
We
need to change our entire way of thinking about health care and
personal responsibility. We need to find a way back to paying for care
ourselves up until a reasonable cap, and reducing the cost of
procedures to something resembling sanity. No, no one should lose their
home or life savings because they contract a bad disease. But on the flip side, we
should not have a system which provides "free" care for every person who
thinks their runny nose necessitates a clinic visit, doctors, tests,
and drugs. But we won't because some believe health and education
problems are solved only by dumping ever more money into endless pits in
the name of equality, regulation, and credential-ism. And you'll never
convince them otherwise.
Edited by Finnforest - September 20 2012 at 22:09
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: December 30 2007
Location: Raeford, NC
Status: Offline
Points: 32524
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 21:09 |
thellama73 wrote:
The health care question is a difficult one, no question, but Rob is on the right track when he says the problem lies with escalating costs, not the fact thta some people are uninsured. If we could get costs under control, a lack of insurance would not mean that a simple operation would bankrupt you for your entire life.
There are a couple of ways to bring down costs, and they all involve a freer market. Right now, government regulations dictate what kind of insurance plans companies can offer and to whom they can sell them. These means that competition is restricted, since I can't buy insurance from a provider in another state. Also, in many places you can't buy a plan that only covers emergencies, you must pay for things like elective procedures, which drives up costs.
Tort reform and dealing with frivolous malpractice lawsuits is important to bring down costs as well, although it's certainly not the whole picture.
Personally, I believe a major problem with the system is the extremely rigorous requirements to practice medicine and the artificially constrained supply by the AMA. Medical schools and licensing entities are structured in such a way as to keep prices high and limit the number of practicing doctors. It also means patients have less choice in their treatment options. If you want to see a doctor, you must pay for a fully accredited one. If you want treatment, you must pay for the state of the art. This is all well and good for those who can afford it, but most of us cannot. The government doesn't force us to buy caviar instead of canned tuna, it shouldn't force us to pay for the most expensive medical care instead of a cheaper option.
If we were allowed to see a doctor with less expensive education, the ones with more education would have to justify their services with either demonstrably superior quality or lower prices. If we were allowed to buy medication over the counter, there would be fewer demands on the doctor's time and therefore lower prices.
Basically any way you can make the market for health care more free will result in lower prices, which means increased access to healthcare for everyone. Sadly, this will never happen because the AMA has convinced the public that we need them to ensure our safety rather than trust our own abilities as savvy consumers.
| Yes. I do not need someone with a decade of post-secondary education and $100,000 in debt to write a prescription for high blood pressure medication and tell me to exercise more. Yet the regulating bodies insist on it.
I want to remind people that I delivered my third child, Ephraim, here at home, with no medical assistance. I, a man with two jobs and two other children, learned how to monitor the heart rate of both the mother and the child, check dilation, guide my wife through labor, massage her back for two hours straight, deliver the placenta, and care for Ephraim after he was born.
We had Simon, our eldest, in a hospital and had to pay $7,000 out of pocket during a period when I had insurance. They had us stay until he pooped. Pooped! They pressured my wife to have an epidural (there's three grand for the anesthesiologist and then the nurses don't have to listen to the woman anymore). The doctor pulled the placenta out of my wife and stitched her up. After the doctor's work, my wife bled for six weeks and was bedridden for two days. After mine, she bled for ten days and needed no more bed rest except eight hours of sleep.
Having Ephraim cost us $325. He is the happiest and healthiest child we've ever had.
Sometimes a white undershirt is better than a white coat...
Edited by Epignosis - September 20 2012 at 21:11
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
Joined: December 30 2007
Location: Raeford, NC
Status: Offline
Points: 32524
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Posted: September 20 2012 at 20:54 |
ClemofNazareth wrote:
Epignosis wrote:
ProgBob wrote:
Epignosis wrote:
My premise is that insurance drives prices up, and that by requiring people to have insurance, the price of healthcare will increase even more.
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As a foreigner, I'm finding this debate interesting but a bit confusing. What sort of system would you advocate?
Presumably, given the views you have expressed, not a socialised system where no-one is required to have insurance and everyone is provided with decent healthcare funded by taxes?
So presumably you want some system where some (probably significant) proportion of people are uninsured. What does being uninsured mean in practice in terms of the services you can access? You said earlier that you were never denied treatment when you didn't have insurance, but I'm curious: are there some restrictions on what sort of treatments you can access? Is it just emergencies for example? What happens, for example, if you have a chronic illness that needs some sort of ongoing management? Or if you need some sort of preventative treatment, or some tests that might catch something early? Do you still need to pay if you get treatment without insurance?
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Insurance is supposed to exist to compensate people who are victims of some grave misfortune, not pay for routine things. "Major medical" is this type of insurance. Insurance should not cover the gamut of health care services, because that drives up the cost. That's not completely accurate for all forms of insurance, many of which offers benefits in addition to disaster protection. Whole life policies for example accrue cash value and in many cases can be used as collateral for loans. Many premium auto insurance policies (including mine) pay dividends to those who drive safely and don't file excessive claims. And most homeowner insurance policies provide a variety of benefits in addition to protecting the policy holder from damage to their home.
Actually, my health care 'insurance' isn't insurance at all, it's health care coverage for my family that is fully intended to cover preventive medicine, normal care including things like sports physicals for my children, pharmaceutical discounts and even inoculations like measles shots and the like. I think you're somewhat fixated on the word "insurance" and seem to equate health care coverage with something like flood insurance.
The issue is not "how do people pay for health care services," but "why has health care become so expensive?" If insurance raises the cost of health care, as I think I have shown it does, then the answer is not "make everyone have insurance." That will aggravate the problem. Like most US government intervention, it helps in the short term but will be disastrous in the long term.
I disagree you have shown this. As I said before, the number and percentage of Americans covered by health insurance has declined steadily for more than a decade, yet the cost of health care continues to rise, almost exponentially. As I said before, this is inconsistent with your theory.
Hospitals here have social workers who work with uninsured people facing disaster. That said, it's a shame that long term treatment is so expensive because it can bankrupt people who need it. But again, the solution is not force everyone into the insurance market- it's to identify reasons for the expensiveness.
Hospital bills account for nearly two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. today, more than double all other causes combined. Sadly, 78% of those people had health care coverage, but it was inadequate to cover their needs. So you are correct that rising health care costs are causing millions of Americans to lose virtually everything they own, even people who are insured. In fact, given those numbers it seems people without insurance are less likely to go bankrupt, mostly because their expenses are written off by hospitals as charitable expenses, or as operating losses. This in turn means those hospitals pay less in taxes (charitable loss write offs), or increased costs for the rest of us when hospitals raise their rates for paying consumers to cover their losses.
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| Whole life policies allow you to borrow against a guaranteed payout (because, you know, death is a guarantee). It does not let you buy medication for a $15 copay. Auto insurance companies have a financial incentive to give discounts to those who drive safely and don't file excessive claims. It does not let you buy an oil change for a $2 copay. As I said, no type of insurance is so comprehensive in direct dealings with their respective markets except for health insurance. This is a major problem. Call it "coverage" if you want. It's a major problem.
Not everyone has to have health insurance for the costs to go up. Look back at my grocery analogy. Some had food insurance and some did not, yet the cost of food rose. Insurance does not have to be universal to be detrimental. When you increase demand, you increase cost. That's how the market works. My premise is not "everyone having insurance results in higher costs" (although it will). My premise is "some having insurance results in higher costs for everyone." Please be clear on that.
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