Medical Tuesday Blog
Healthcare is Expensive.
The practice of medicine and resultant health care cost has been pushed far out of proportion to their basic costs. This has precipitated the Myth and Rumor that health care is so very expensive that you could suffer and possibly die if you did not have health insurance. But almost all health insurance can make you poor. This can cause great anxiety and even major health crises which then would be very expensive. Basic health care continues to be very reasonable. The expensive items are very limited. If you have a motor vehicle or motor-cycle accident, the costs will generally revert to emergency hospital care which is always expensive. If you need major surgery, the costs will escalate rapidly. A medical crises such as stroke, heart attack, or cancer can be catastrophic. So the expensive parts of our healthcare are few: Trauma care, Hospitalization for a medical crises, Surgery care, and Cancer care. These are the only items for which we need medical insurance. These are the items that are included in high deductible health insurance. (HDHI) These high deductible health Plans (HDHP) are quite reasonably priced and generally affordable. However, basic health care is reasonable and affordable without health insurance. To obtain health insurance to cover basic office visits, preventive care such as immunizations and occasional basic examinations will more than double the cost of these items. This places these affordable items into the Medical-Insurance-Hospital-Industrial-Complex which is very expensive and uncontrolled. We must re-assume control personally. Otherwise your insurance plan will have to control your medical appetite regardless of how it affects your health. Anyone who has been the subject to an HMO, Medicaid, or any other panel health plan already knows that to obtain authorization is not only time consuming, but also may adversely affect your health. (For instance my staff spent three days to obtain authorization for surgery for a patient with acute appendicitis. Normally a hot appendix is surgically removed immediately on diagnosis. A ruptured appendix causes peritonitis which can be fatal.) Basic health care is what we go to our doctors to treat routine colds, minor injuries, minor trauma, occasional physical examinations, eye exam if we have vision problems, immunization as children with occasional boosters in adulthood as necessary, occasional screening laboratory exams (blood counts, urine checks, cholesterol check with repeats if elevated), occasional chest x-rays, occasion ECGs in middle age, occasional prostate and pelvic exams. If these are paid for by the patient, they will be less than half of what insurance pays. A $500 deductible plan would be sufficient until you are 40 when you may need a $1000 deductible until age 50 and thereafter $2000 deductible. This will seem like appropriate primary health care since you may save $10,000 or so on your high deductible health insurance (HDHI) or plan (HDHP). Furthermore, by paying privately, you will be able to manage costs effectively. This would then get the government out of your private personal and intimate life. We demonstrated last month in this Journal that our friends north of the border in Canada are suffering from long wait times for medically necessary treatments. This is costing Canadians $2.1 billion—or $1,924 per patient—in lost wages and time last year. For a family of 4, that is nearly $8,000 of non-medical costs before you even see your physician. Our Canadian friends have no idea of how many taxes they pay to get this allegedly free but costly delayed care. Canadians have Medicare-For-All. The politicians that tout the benefits of Medicare-For-All in our country are hoodwinking the populace. Once it’s implemented, it will be too late to change back To change back to what Europe and other countries currently (and always) have, means that we will have fought the revolutionary war in vain and negate nearly two and one-half centuries of the American Experiment of equal opportunity and classless society. This has never happened before. We are developing a two-class society since the 1950s with government intrusion into our healthcare and private lives. (Please see our series in section 4 on government healthcare in this journal over the past several months.) Be careful how you vote—whether you’re voting forward to the American vision of 1776 or voting backwards to our pre-revolutionary days—remember, President Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” This is apparent as we see immigrants crowding our borders to seek American Freedom as our Founders envisioned it. Let us not be the generation that extinguishes the worlds last best hope for humankind. Feedback . . . Medical Myths and Rumors originate when someone else pays the medical bills. Myths and Rumors disappear when Patients pay a Co-payment on Every Service. * * * * * |
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