http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=ac_Ad5Car70M Americans pay 2.5 Trillion for Healthcare that cost just 912Billion in 2003 We call this Free market in full performance.
Where do you see a free market in health care in the United States? Can you buy and keep insurance policies across state lines? Can you have the option to buy insurance that doesn't cover accupuncture and acne which is mandated in states like New York? Can you freely negotiate a fee for service with a doctor who otherwise accepts insured patients? Where is this mythical free market you're talking about? And if the free market drives up costs, then why are computers, Ipods, toilet paper, airplane rides and a whole variety of other goods produced in an actual free market so cheap? Why are Ipods falling in price instead of rising? If your child got sick, would you want to restrict yourself to technology available in 2003? Or would you be willing to pay for the medical technology that was developed last year?
"Cost" and "spending" are conflated by these morons. One reason for rising spending is plastic surgery and about 10% of modern healthcare spending is for dealing with the side-effects of your ever increasing weight. Plastic surgery used to only be for the rich - it's not covered by insurance. Now, half the women in every trailer park on the outskirts of your town has a boob job. Spending on medical procedures is up partly because everybody is getting a nose job and fake tits. the CBO estimates that about half the increase in health care spending results from changes in medical procedures resulting from breakthroughs in medical technology. Why is that a bad thing?
This is called American capitalism. Monopoly Money Our good friend Senator Blanche Lincoln thinks it's very dangerous for the insurance companies to have to compete with a public plan option: âOne of our biggest concerns is that it doesnât need to be a government plan that usurps that ability to compete in the marketplace, which Iâm concerned that a totally government-run option would do,â she said. Right. It's competition in the marketplace that makes this country great. Like the competition they have in Lincoln's state of Arkansas, for instance: The Justice Department considers an industry to be âhighly concentratedâ if one company has 42 percent of the market. In Arkansas â Senator Lincoln should take note â Blue Cross Blue Shield has 75 percent of the market. If you take government self-insurance plans out of the equation, it's higher. The state ranks as the ninth most concentrated in the country. Is it any wonder that insurance premiums have risen five times as fast as wages? Introducing a public plan option that individuals and businesses could choose instead of Blue Cross would be very detrimental to Blue Cross, that's true. They would lose their monopoly for sure and very likely lose a lot of customers if they kept raising rates at the clip they've been raising them: Here is a clue to the Arkansas problem â and the national one, too. From 2000 to 2007, the median earnings of Arkansas workers rose only 12 percent, from $20,328 to $22,692. Health insurance premiums for the average working Arkansas family rose over the same period by 66 percent. --------------------------------------- Senate Panel Hears of Health Insurers' Wrongs Health insurers have forced consumers to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that the insurers themselves should have paid, according to a report released today by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee.[/b] The report was part of a multi-pronged assault on the credibility of private insurers by Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). It came at a time when Rockefeller, President Obama and others are seeking to offer a public alternative to private health plans as part of broad health reform legislation. Health insurers are doing everything they can to block the public option. At a committee hearing today, three health care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell "junk" policies that fail to cover needed care. Rockefeller said he was exploring "why consumers get such a raw deal from their insurance companies." The star witness at the hearing was a former public relations executive for major health insurers whose testimony boiled down to this: Don't trust the insurers. ------------------ Just another day in the so called greatest country on Earth. lol
There's no competition with government. Why? Because government has unlimited access to taxpayer funds to subsidize its losses to undercut private companies who have no such ability to rape the taxpayer. THAT is why a public "option" always results in NO options but the government. Note what happened to the student loan market when the government decided to provide a government "option". There are no private lenders left in that market.
BTW, If you want to increase competition in health insurance (which I am ALL for), then remove the barrier to buying insurance across state lines. Make the insurance companies compete for customers instead of protecting them from competition and enforce their policies in the courts and in the court of competition.
i have blue cross. i got a 30% increase last year and 25% this year. wonder what next year brings. we are at the point now that an average family pays more for insurance than a house payment.
Make them compete for customers all over the United States instead of allowing state insurance regulators create a captive audience for them. BTW, about 10% of the cost is due to obesity and our healthcare spending is increasing by less than Switzerland's and France's annually and on par with the average for the 23 OECD countries. Switzerland's is exceeding GDP by 2.08% and France's health care spending is rising 1.87% more than GDP every year. So, there's no free lunch there either. BTW, in the last 30 years, your probability of dying from a heart attack in the United States went from 40% to 6%. Are you not willing to pay for that?
Insurance needs to be reduced to the point where nobody can have a deductible of less than $5000. People would have an incentive to be healthy....but more importantly they would then research what their DR is doing. When people were charged $200 for lipitor they did not need when Red Yeast rice, which is the same thing, is available for $12 a month; they would attack their DR and chase him off a bridge. Insurance is a problem, but heartless DRs who make no effort to cure their patients, but every effort to own 4 houses and a plane, are the bigger issue.