Where is all the money for Health Care going?
Everyone complains that U.S. healthcare is too expensive and it certainly is! Where is all that money going: well over $2 trillion/year? Objective analysis shows ten reasons why we spend money on healthcare. The US healthcare system is the best in the world! — Only if you can access and afford it. America has the most expensive and yet not the best healthcare in the world. Plans have been proposed to increase access to health insurance and streamline information sharing by digitizing medical records; government has failed to identify some elephants in the room that need to be addressed. Some say we must have free health care available to all because medical care is too expensive for most people. A serious illness can cause bankruptcy.
Promises were made about attractive health care features knowing they would not be in the final product and funds were secreted into the bill in such a way they will be difficult to remove, this at a time when our economy is on the verge of bankruptcy. Why can’t many lower middle class Americans afford quality health care? To provide an adequate answer to this question, we first need to define the American class system in terms of socioeconomics and its relationship to general health care system. Thirty percent of all healthcare dollars is paid to providers of all kinds. Thirty percent reimburses institutions: hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, wheelchair manufacturers and the like. The remainder (40% or roughly $920 billion in 2008 in the USA) just…disappears. It goes to activities and services that provide no health care for patients.
When a person calls a medical practitioner for an appointment, the first question of the medical office staff is if the person has health insurance. If the person doesn’t have health insurance, the attitude of the office staff changes dramatically. Another contributing factor as to why many working class Americans cannot afford health care is due to the continued rising costs of over-all health care. Total health care costs, including insurance premiums have gone up drastically since 2001
And finally there is corruption in a government run health care system. Dr. Starner Jones, an emergency room physician, has termed our current system a “Culture Crisis” instead of a “Health Care Crisis”. This may require a change in the American healthcare system itself or quite possibly, a change within government medical aid. Either way, one thing is certain: Without the basic necessities of life, including quality healthcare, the working class over time is sure to crumble. #fb
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This is one hell of a confusing article. This country doesn’t have a government-run health care program for all citizens. The only government-run health care system in existence is Medicare for senior citizens. It has a very low overhead, something like 8%, which means that 92% actually is paid out to medical professionals.
Everyone else is supposed to buy PRIVATE health insurance from insurance companies. But as you said, many people cannot afford the premiums or can’t get insurance in the first place because of a long list of pre-existing conditions. Of the money paid to private health insurance, a huge percentage (around 30%) goes to overhead–and that includes the tens of millions their CEOs pay themselves in salaries.
As for bashing “Obasmacare,” I have yet to hear anyone on the right propose a substitute, especially one the middle and lower classes can afford.
Have you never heard of medicaid??
Also your claim that medicare is 92% efficient is incorrect because it ignores the fraud waste and abuse in the system. Medicare is actually about 50% efficient.
Why should anyone propose a substitute for obamacare? Socialized health care has failed where ever it is tried. Why would we want to throw our hat into the ring to propose a different but still fatal socialized health care system???