The healthcare business is probably the most distressing example of what happens when we ‘let the market decide.’ Health care for profit means delivering the least amount of health care service for the maximum amount of money.
(Paul D’Amato)
This topic gets me so wound. Forgive the verbal spew in advance, reader.
It’s more insidious than what’s written above, though! When you’re having a heart attack, are you shopping around for the cheapest ambulance ride? Are you making sure the ER they’re rushing you to is in network? How about your attending doctor? Their consulting cardiologist? The anaesthetician? (Yes, all of these services are billed separately. Yes, they can be from different care networks. Messed up, yes?)
The healthcare system in america is designed to keep the healthy people healthy under the terms listed above, and then to utterly bankrupt and ruin those individuals or families unfortunate enough to face a genuine emergency or chronic illness. Most families in America are one car crash, one cancer diagnosis, or one heart attack away from poverty. And nobody really wants to talk about this, because it means confronting the inevitability of one’s own eventual decline and death.
Barring sudden demise, everyone reading this post will at one point or another require some form of terminal medical treatment. And when the hospital bills start mounting up, and the 80/20 cost split begins to pile on– assuming you’re fortunate enough to have insurance… single payer health insurance will start sounding pretty good.
But nobody will want to listen to you then, because they’re healthy. They don’t want to pay for your illness. Why should they have to cover the costs of your care?
The vast majority of people in my generation are going to die not only penniless, but in massive amounts of debt. The institutional poverty that the working and middle classes have escaped for the better part of the last century? That’s going to come creeping back one bankrupt estate at a time.
People are fooling themselves if they imagine this isn’t by design. This is why expansions to Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are crucial in the near term, and a total revolution in our national health care system is required in the long term.
My kid’s college education shouldn’t disappear because my wife had to have spinal surgery. My retirement savings shouldn’t disappear because she had to take medical leave from work. They did. Were it not for my privileged birth and repeated intercession by my wealthy parents we wouldn’t have a house, a car, any money in the bank, functional credit… none of that.
My kid’s education is highly at risk and my retirement is just gone. Ten years of work on my 401k evaporated. And I am one of the lucky ones.
(via adhocavenger)
