This was all said after drinking a couple home made stouts (7% ABV) so I reserve the right to say, "You're right." <g>
LOL! Why not, enjoy it.
I think that US healthcare is very good, compared to other nations. The principle amount of waste is caused not so much by fraud as by complexity - to a large extent resulting from overregulation. If you walk into any hospital, you'll discover that they are crowded with people who do not make any contribution to patient care. Many of them push paper, trying to comply with demands coming from the Joint Commission, from the H2S, from the State and County Health dept's, etc.
Getting paid is very complicated. Medicare and medicaid employ armies of people whose job it is to find reasons to deny payments. In turn, hospitals and clinics employ crowds of people who are experts of wringing money out of those 2 and from the private insurers as well.
The culture of defensive medicine is also very expensive. Everyone talks about unnecessary testing - but what about unnecessary hospital admissions? Every day, great numbers of people get admitted for CYA reasons. Every one of those admissions will cost thousands.
Where am I going with all this? OK... (maybe it's my turn to take a brake and have a drink -g). Bottom line is that a true reform would address those issues. Instead, we'll be going deeper into a quagmire of more expensive regulation and micromanagement. What we need is the opposite - massive DEregulation, simplification - and tort reform. All these can be addressed even while we develop better ways of helping the truly needy.
If that happens, we'd be having a meaningful reform. Regrettably, that is not what's on the table.
I doubt that government deserves any significant credit for America's success. Maybe they do -- to the extent that they haven't been interfering with the productive forces of the nation quite as much as it was historically the norm in other lands. Most of the credit for that should go to America's founders. |
