I explain how the idea of health insurance for all actually increases costs and puts a healthier America further out of reach.
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As usual, on-point!
Of your many journalistic triumphs, Sharyl, this is a rich vein of information. I’ve been preaching this for years. It’s simple economics.
The corruption in healthcare is obscene. Please keep exposing it!
There must be a way to restore some balance to the medical system without throwing out all of the babies with the bathwater …
The protectionist guilds (AMA, etc.) are short sighted in their blind defense of the old order (vaccine programs, insurances, structures), but there must also be some protection of individual practitioners. The medical organizations have some limited utility in gaining some protections for some practitioners somewhat, though not well or across the spectrum. We have a strange situation where the legal framework leaves doctors out to dry and gives corporations a pass on policies: doctors are regulated up the wazoo while corporations are free to dictate to doctors how to practice without the corporations having liability for the commands that they give to the doctors, dentists, etc. Corporations are about the bottom line and not ethics, and that includes HMOs. If a practitioner gets in trouble with a licensing board or patient for doing something commanded by a corporation, only the doctor suffers the consequences usually because they are the ones subjected to the regulations. It’s topsy turvy. If we turn the medical insurance system upside down, will we escalate getting “health care” via Amazon and corporations (poorly regulated and with deep pockets to avoid liability) rather than getting individualized care from individual practitioners, making things even worse than they are now? How can we fix this extraordinarily bureaucratized system, protect the public and improve health? The doctors coming out of school these days have little interest in private practice. It’s too hard and too expensive. The whole process turns them into sheep. (You will always have some unethical doctors, too, but their impacts are not as great as the corporations.)
All politicians must hustle donations to stay in business. That is the structure. Judge them by what they do. If they take money, they are not necessarily being led by the nose, but you can tell if they are by how they behave.
Likewise, anyone in medicine is going to receive education influenced by the pharmaceutical and other commercially related medical suppliers and corporations. That doesn’t mean that practitioners are going to buy all of their products or believe everything that they say necessarily. Although critical thinking and logic need to be better taught along the way somewhere to ALL people and not just practitioners/doctors/nurses, etc…
You said it right: we have a “symbiotic web of insurers, providers, and politicians who benefit from the chaos” and that “insurance severed the direct link between patient and provider”. And that “Medicare and Medicaid”…”set rates”…”influenced by medical industry lobbyists and donors” and then “private insurers use those same rates”. That IS how it all works in an endless loop. And “government and industry dictate “approved” treatments” and love to control the works.
Somehow, we need to be able to provide catastrophic type insurance and have the public pay out of pocket for the other stuff. The public will scream that this is rationing, but we already have that. It will be more significant, though.
Currently, there is a shortage of doctors who want to practice independently and an even bigger shortage of patients who want to pay independently. But maybe these attitudes will change as the system gets sicker and sicker and sicker.
I don’t disagree with what you were saying in your podcast however I wonder what the 10 million illegals using our healthcare system is doing to costs. When they go to the hospital and receive care and don’t pay the bill the hospitals need to recover that cost somehow. That has to cost them millions. Not to mention the gun fight in big cities with gangs taken to trauma centers. Who pays the hospitals for those costs ? The other factor is lawyers suing and driving malpractice costs up for doctors.
Sharyl, Lisa—and Full Measure Team :
Re : Communists’ Turning of Self-Responsibility into Village-Responsibility;
that is, Making of Housing, Food, and Health ‘Human Rights’
—see the Marxism/Communism expressed in HUMAN Rights movements ?
So, for example, my Beatnik-/Hippie-type neighbor spends his weekends bar-hopping/drug-abusing/orgie-holding H E D O N I S M while demanding of me (( and of you )) monetary payments for his poor-health/doctor-needed Life-Style (( actually, his Death-Style )).
Health must necessarily be
one’s Self-Responsibility—or
the collective of civilized
society in America eventually/
necessarily collapses, via meet-
ing the needs of the lowest
common denominator of BAD
men and women (( of Libertine
Liberals in the Entertainment
Class and their citizen-
followers who champion deca-
dence in Hollywood/Music/
Comedy industries )).
As the late black professor
Walter Williams had repeatedly
opined, in his newspaper
columns : “Welfare systems in
America are unconstitutional,”
because they ROB from one
citizen his/her hard-labor-gained
money and give it away to
support another (( less self-re-
sonsible )) citizen.
Communism is M O R O N I C, as
it is ideological means for True-
Believer Marxists to STEAL his/her
neighbors’ property (( the Univer-
sal Free-Sex component of Marxism
notwithstanding, which gives UGLY/
Incel men access to beautiful
females—see Brutalitarian/Bolshevik
Soviet-Russia )).
-Rick