A Conversation About Medicare Please
August 14, 2012 - Author: newscoma - Comments are closedWhy aren’t we talking about Medicare?
There are a lot of retirement communities in the state of Tennessee. Someone who has paid their dues who might be near retirement or currently receiving care might sort of care about this.
Get on this, politicians and give us some real answers and not a lot of political rhetoric. You’d be surprised because you obviously aren’t paying attention that people appreciate adult conversations about items that effect their day-to-day lives.
Categories: Tennessee
Discussion (2 Comments)
No health insurance company would willingly underwrite old people. In fact, it’s not a good thing our health care system was set up on an ‘insurance’ basis. You just can’t underwrite human health the way you can buildings and businesses. Healthcare costs and savings should be the responsibility of a Not For Profit, preferably the government. Private insurance is first concerned about shareholder profits. Real life health goes way down at the bottom. They don’t need a ‘death panel’ – a single employee can do the job.
The cost of health care, and the number of “high end” users (seniors and long-term ill) are the main factors driving the cost of Medicare to the point of unaffordability in the foreseeable future. We cannot control the number of high-end users (driven currently by the baby boomers) unless we adopt draconian policies that fly against our values. The Ryan solution affects ALL users in a draconian fashion, and so skirts that issue in a weird, and obviously futile, fashion. So, the costs of health care have to be addressed in the short term while we look for ways (if there are any) to control the high end users in the future (i.e., when the baby boomers have disappeared).
Health care costs tend to have an international component, especially when it comes to supplies and pharmaceuticals, so they cannot be controlled, per se. But we can use this to an advantage because, often, these international suppliers offer more inexpensive materials. The problem is that US law is often written to prohibit purchase from these international firms at the behest of US manufacturers and suppliers. We have to learn to take a hard stand on this issue to force US pharmaceutical firms especially to provide quality products at a reduced cost or deal with international competition fairly.
Hospital service provided for profit is a drain on the Medicare system despite being billed the same as NFP hospitals. This is a complicated problem that, I admit, I don’t understand well enough to explain logically in a small space. But I know it has to do with bureaucratic costs vs patient advantages and the cost of fraud.
Then there is the general issue of bureaucratic costs. Both of these items are addressed to an extent in ACA, but not effectively. And many of the solutions offered merely transfer new problems from Washington to doctors’ offices, making age-old fears come true and cutting support for the law among a most crucial group. Once the solutions are generalized, these new, time-consuming, costly problems may go away. But that may take years. In the meantime, many a disgruntled doctor, nurse and administrative assistant will be cursing the day they heard of ACA.
The final leg in the health care cost system is insurance. If it isn’t clear by now it never will be: the only way to control the cost of insurance is to create a universal, single-payer system. Nothing prohibits having a premium insurance system in addition and a premium health care system to match it. But something like Medicare-for-all is a necessity to meet the insurance needs of the vast majority of Americans. Unfortunately, nothing like this is on the horizon and it is unlikely that any politician will find fertile ground in the foreseeable future to plant and sow the seed for this idea in Congress. The Health Care lobby is too large and wealthy, both parties are comfortably in its pocket, and, as usual, no one on Capitol Hill feels the necessary sense of urgency. In the meantime we will see various schemes to reduce the growth of rates, or force insurance companies to reduce their profit margins by a tenth of a percentage point.