Costs up almost 10% in 2 years? Poor delivery of care, many uncovered at all, and yet the price is almost 2 1/2 trillion per year now? This is America, Land of White Collar Run-Away Crime. This simply is not the best health care system in the world and far from that. See U.S. health care spending reaches $2.4 trillion in ’08
All this profiteering off human suffering caused not just by disease and old aging, but a human economic system that rewards greed, callousness, and sheer theft! Public health has been dismantled, and the role of poverty in making disease proliferate everywhere totally ignored. And we have a tiered system of delivery where some get superior care, and others get next to none. America is a sick country with a sick system of delivery of Medical Care. And it is not getting any better. We’ve been lying down and playing dead. We’ve been dying… PERIOD… because we have accepted this atrocity without fighting enough against it. In fact, most have gone along with it without giving it even a single thought.
No need to call EMS for this sick system. It is already dead!
I found out two weeks ago that Colorado Medicaid no longer pays for tooth extraction in adults unless you go through the Emergency Room.
A $150 procedure suddenly costs nearly ten times as much.
That’s nowhere nearly “cost effective”.
CHAMPVA was bottlenecked into bouncing back Miss Johnnies bills for primary care and ER care (when the Leischmaniasis acted up again over Christmas) because she had been on a prescription supplemental plan from AARP.
Their system identified it as Primary Insurance.
Single payer, babies, single payer or we have nothing BUT nightmares like that Forever…
The continuing growth in health expenditures in the U.S. is, in addition a consequence of an aging population (in general, older people consume more health services), a reflection of a system that contains inherent flaws. Those flaws manifest themselves in outcomes, access, and costs.
U.S. health expenditures have been growing faster than the economy as a whole for an extended period of time. In the long-run, such a situation is not sustainable. At some point, it would begin crowding out other economic activity from the burdens of financing such a system. Those burdens would also drain funds that might otherwise flow to productive private and public investments. In turn, those reduced investments would translate into impaired economic competitiveness, a lower level of economic growth, a reduced standard of living.
Perhaps one can view the continuing growth in health expenditures relative to nominal growth as akin to an economic bubble. As should be more than evident in the wake of the collapsed U.S. housing bubble, bubbles or bubble-type excesses, can end very badly. Impaired economic output, a reduced quality of care/access to care for a larger aged population, and/or a fiscal crisis are possible long-run scenarios barring fundamental health care reform.
There’s also a sustained insidious neglect of Basic Health because it’s too expensive for the poor, salaries aren’t enough to cover basic housing and nutrition AND health care on top.
Many of the cases in veterans hospitals and clinics are the results of long term sublimated PTSD, the physical symptoms of a wounded soul.
Fairly cheap to treat if there’s early intervention, but the Military Mindset refuses to acknowledge the biggest gaping hole in their armor.
With each passing decade of post-service, and the untreated PTSD, the more physical symptoms are going to arise.
And the more difficult to treat and thus more costly.
The medical analogy most closely fitted is that of putting a bandaid on a broken leg
Maybe splint it so it doesn’t break further, but a fracture has to be re-set in order to make the bone knit together straight, in proper alignment.
The longer it goes without that, sure, the bone will heal… crooked…
And with each passing year, with the successive use of the limb, but favored and “out of step”, the more the scar tissue and poorly joined old fracture bends the healing bone.
After a decade or so, any repairs would cost in terms of time and procedures about 20 times what it would have cost to set the bone correctly.
–if it had been done early.
The pillage economy, based on being able to force others to give their resources into building our basic wealth, costs many ways.
It costs to break down the defense of the Pillaged Nation, much like Iraq.
It would then cost even more to rebuild the infrastructure so that Their Wealth can be effectively extracted.
There is, surprise surprise surprise, no net gain to the Invading and Pillaging nation.
It costs far more to extract wealth that way than by simply negotiation of a fair price value for the goods.
The dominoes start to fall, an increased number of wounded, strains not only the money supply but also the pool of trained educated Medical Personnel, kept deliberately low in order to inflate the price of health care.
The surge of trauma injuries overwhelms an already close to bursting system.
Cuba, of all places, and Mexico, have a solution that really works.
Until such times as a notorious Neighborhood Bully of the Caribbean lands 10,000 troops on one of the sovereign nations which has some very fine medical schools in order to “rescue” the island nation from voting in a Marxist leaning government.
But that, too, has been rebuilt.
The Same Neighborhood Bully has invaded Mexico and demanded they “reform” their economic structure to suit the “needs” of the Ruling Class of the N.B. nation.
Which will privatize their medical schools and remake them in our own flawed system’s image.
And the dominoes fall… Another nation lined up for similar Regime Change and reallocation of Resources from Their People to a select few of Our People, is Venezuela.
Expect to spend even more Public Resources, scarcer and scarcer, to enrich the Private Corporations further.
And they still make the silly demand that they not have to pay taxes on their ill gotten stolen goods.
Expect more of the same downward spiral in an overburdened Private Health system.
There has been, in the past century, in one country in particular, an Extreme Rationing of health care resources, namely, killing people with mental illnesses, the elderly and people with an incurable viral disease, Polio.
Would America ever come to that point?
If the current FAILED system continues to be propped up and successful models continue to be dismissed as “socialist” and therefore, in the ears and minds of the Party Faithful, “unworkable”….
It will lead to that.
In Fort Worth Texas less than ten years ago the crisis peaked at John Peter Smith Hospital, people were literally dying in the emergency room waiting area, sometimes for two days.
The same Budgetary Train Wreck of a corporate “Leader” who just lost the last presidential election was Governor of Texas and had applied in Texas the same health care funding model that’s now nationwide.
Denial of health care maintenance, fundamental health care…
People who were working under the “right to work” Law and making barely enough to keep the belly button off the spine… (Texas saying, you can figure it out) and whose ONLY health care option was the drastically more expensive Emergency Room.
Some of it made the news, but it was quickly swept under the rug.
Can’t have the Corporate Press exposing the Massive Failure of the economic plan on which the Current Governor is basing his platform in the Presidential Campaign, now, can we?
A small fraction of such cases were reported in the news, and then the story was buried almost as quickly as the first victims of The Policy were.
Jonah,
You wrote:
The same Budgetary Train Wreck of a corporate “Leader” who just lost the last presidential election was Governor of Texas and had applied in Texas the same health care funding model that’s now nationwide.
President Bush, who had previously served as Governor of Texas, was not eligible to seek re-election. Arizona Senator John McCain, not Mr. Bush, lost the 2008 election.
Ah, you almost got it.
McInsane is referred to as Bush Lite, and his campaign was and still referred to as “Bush’s Third Term”.
There would have been no change with the “Maverickiness” of the McPalin Hate Team.
It was deliberate, and most of the readers would immediately recognize it as such.
The differences between Bush and McCain aren’t even a “technicality” as there are so few of them.
It’s not even an “inside” joke, so many people recognized that McBush was just the same old puke regurgitated once again.
Americans just got a little tired of being puked on is all.