I work in the health care system, not in a medical capacity but in more of a clerical/admin role. I can say definitively that much of our work, and thus our expense, is cause specifically by Federal standards and paperwork we have to comply with due to our accepting Medicare, even if the patient is not a Medicare patient. Many of our procedures are driven by government standards, and a lot of things that should be decided by doctors are instead decided by rules made years ago by people not involved in the treatment end of medicine. I have seen patients who came in and had to be put on one-to-one nursing care classified as “observation” patients rather than inpatient, because that is all that the Medicare charts show they should be charged at.
I can’t help but suspect that the people who brought us Medicare will not be the answer to keeping rising medical costs down.
“no amount of good living will protect you from bad genetics.” Ain’t that the truth. People like me who have diabetes would be dead pretty quickly without access to relatively frequent medical care. I come from a family where diabetes runs on both sides. It is not a lifestyle issue, it is not something I did, it is something that happened. From the standpoint of society, if I don’t get medical treatment because of lack of insurance, it is not that big a deal — I die, my family is bankrupted, nobody else is probably dragged down with us.
However, if someone has (for instance) the flu and doesn’t get treatment because of lack of insurance, chances are they will spread it far and wide, and if it were the mythical deadly pandemic that people see swine flu as, many people would die from it. At the least, it is in the public interest to see that either medical insurance or affordable health care is available pretty much universally.
I just wish there were somewhere besides the government we could turn for it…
As far as President Obama’s promise that we would be able to keep our current coverage and doctors if we want, he didn’t mention the correlary to that: You will still have to pay for the new system,whatever it may be, whether you use it or not.
