I am in my mid forties. With the exception of three months of prescription quit-smoking drugs, my utilization of professional health care services over the past ten years has been limited to six physicals. Including the drugs, about $1,500 worth of health care over a decade.
During the past ten years, my insurance premiums have totaled just over $20,000. My monthly premiums have risen every year from their original $90. Most recently, they jumped from $200 to $300 three months after I quit smoking.
My "non-profit" insurer pays its CEO $4M a year, spends 18% of its premiums on administrative costs, rewards its top couple hundred sales people with Caribbean vacations and is currently spending my premiums on advertising trying to block health care reform. It also employs a cadre of nurses not as care providers, but as gatekeeping bureaucrats whose jobs are to ration care by approving or denying payment.
Here is the simple "public option" I want: Let me buy into Medicare if I want to. Price it so it is self-sustaining, heck add a couple bucks a month if it helps ameliorate the coming financial challenges. Then let me decide if the care and costs work for me.
Unless you are a mean self-centered fart who just cannot stand to see people have better options or a rigid slave to a broken ideology, how can you possibly have a problem with that?
Something I can finally agree with you on.
ReplyDeleteHealth Care is the one issue that affects EVERYBODY and it ain't working. So let's either fix or change it. I'm talking about big overhaul fixing and changing and not a bandaid and aspirin and hope the problem will go away, because it won't.
And please let's leave political shenigans out of it. That's so UnAmerican!
Roch, how long have I been jumping up and down in this blogosphere telling you that "non-profits" in this state (Blue Cross included - I pay $700/month) are bleeding us all dry (BILLIONS of dollars wasted in one poorly-thought-out scam or another) and suffer virtually NO oversight . . . certainly NOT from the government that cuts them all the breaks (because they're "charities") . . . the government that you naively want to turn everything over to?
ReplyDeleteOh, and what happened to me - at the hands of one of those "non-profits" - is "irrelevant".
Good Lord, man. Grow up. Get a clue. Medicine isn't free. And third party insurance is what it is - a game of craps - you are betting that at some point you will get sick and need the insurance - and the insurance companies are hedging their bets against you. The house always wins - even if it winds up paying. That's how the house keeps the game going.
You're not five years old. There is no magic money tree.
If you, as a productive citizen, don't pay one way, you will pay another - and I can guarandamnedtee you that healthcare will be exponentially MORE expensive if/when the government runs everything.
Instead of creating more monster entitlement programs - and passing more bad laws - loaded with "unintended consequences" and hidden costs (a good portion of them administrative), why don't you and your "progressive" friends start clamouring for better oversight of the programs we've already got?
Then talk to me (one of those "dime-a-dozen" healthcare providers Obama wants to beat into submission) about "reform" and a "public option".
Dr. Mary,
ReplyDeleteNot to worry.
Sick a fork in it.. It's done
Fred Gregory