Quote of the Day – 2009/10/27
By John Goodman Filed under Uncategorized on October 27, 2009 with 7 comments
“There is no business in America that makes more money than the insurance industry.”
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It’s the big lie.
The federal government is obviously a bigger business than the “insurance industry”. If he’s referring to health insurance alone, the federal government probably accounts for around 40% of U.S. health spending, post February stimulus. And health care is only one of many businesses in the U.S. government exploits. And, of course, the government is growing by leaps and bounds faster than any other business. The real challenge is how to measure government profit. Obviously we cannot reckon it in the usual, business-like way. However, it clearly exists. For example, Medicare might be the U.S. government’s biggest profit center, because it transfers income from people who have a lower likelihood of voting and higher marginal propensity to keep working under high taxes to those with the opposite characteristics.
What planet is Reid living on?
This quote comes from the same man who voted to give the Senate a $76 million budget increase this year.
A $76 million budget increase for 100 senators. Paid for by taxpayers. During a recession.
If anyone is scamming the American people, the insurance industry can’t hold a candle to the Senate.
I do not pretend to understand all of the intricacies and complexities of health care costs and I’ve never studied economics.
But I have a strong gut feeling that health insurance itself has contributed to the high cost of health care – malpractice and technology notwithstanding.
It’s socialistic in nature (e.g., through an employer’s program, my family’s premium is the same as another family’s premium, with no regard to health or lifestyle of either family).
It manifests a great pool of $ (like a tax pool, no?) with a “gatekeeper” that displaces the patient (payer), breaking that relationship between the biller (health care provider) and the payer. In other words, the natural market controls of capitalism at the most basic level (seller/buyer) are negated; the insurance system seems to create an unnatural and false market.
An evidence of this is the fact that many health care providers negotiate quite casually and willingly with patients who do not have insurance or whose insurance won’t cover necessary procedures, often reducing the cost of their services by 1/3 or ½.
Does anyone out there agree or disagree? Can anyone comment on these observations? I’m not asking if they’re valid or invalid based on the answer to a system without health care insurance. Thank you.
Another thought: as screams are heard from the beneficiaries of Medicare (don’t take “their” dollars and give them to the “young”), we must remember that this is a war over access to entitlement $.
The ACTUAL problem is the COST of HEALTH CARE. Fix THAT and Health Care is available to all. The ANSWERS must attack the current conditions AFFECTING the HEALTH CARE COST (i.e. MARKET), as well as our own beliefs about Health, Health Care, personal responsibility for one’s health. The ANSWERS will take a lot more ENERGY, TIME, EFFORT than Obama’s Robin Hood approach, which is EASY, IMMORAL, and quite frankly, DIVISIVE (to our citizenry). Those who oppose the immorality of TAKE-and-GIVE socialistic policy are cast as DARK / GREEDY / UNCARING. Those who answer (EVERY HEART’S) desire to see every ill person made well – IGNORING the damning evidence of Federal Government programs & DAMNING the consequences of expanding those programs – cast themselves as CARING and therefore SUPERIOR. Unfortunately, money that grows on trees is worthless – and destructive. We cannot fix this problem by stealing or printing money!
I myself believe that insurance is one of the culprits, if not the most significant culprit. Not because insurance companies are “greedy,” however. I believe that insurance elevates the cost of health care in an insidious way – by its very nature. By creating this huge pool of $ controlled by a third party (the insurance company), the commercial relationship between the seller (doctor) and buyer (patient) is OBLITERATED. Americans complain about the monthly premium costs, but we pay them gratefully because we know that a hospital stay (the actual HEALTH CARE COST) can easily amount to $100,000. Do I, the patient, really care how much the doctor charges if I pay only a smidgeon of it? NO. You see? The two-party commercial relationship doesn’t exist in Health Care. Where else does this occur in our economic system? Health Care Insurance is itself a socialist system! And its reimbursement standards are based on Medicare, another socialistic system!
The only way for Health Care Costs to return to a seller-buyer regulated market is to totally rethink our approach to disease and Health Care. MOST disease and illness are due to behaviors and lifestyles that WE CHOOSE. Hmmmm… think about that. WE create our own NEED for Health Care to a very large degree. Then WE think we have a RIGHT to be TREATED for those conditions that WE have SELF-IMPOSED (again, to a large degree) – no matter the cost, no matter the cost to whom. We drink, do drugs, smoke, choose crap instead of real food; we don’t exercise, don’t sleep enough.
Now: what if we knew there were no security blanket – no health care insurance $ to unethically depend on (again, I’m speaking with regard to self-imposed poor health due to our own personal choices)? How would knowing that health care insurance $ weren’t available to us for those self-imposed diseases affect our behaviors and lifestyle choices?
What if, for example, the government demanded that we contribute to a savings plan of our own choice (not controlled by the government) for our own medicare care expenses? And providers did not have access to a bottomless well of (insurance) $? How would this change – radically – the cost of health care?
Millions of us willingly take on a 5-6 year car note to drive that dream car; we buy a house on a 20 or 30 yr mortgage… the actual cost to us for that dream car and house is WAY above the sticker price – thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars! We don’t question this wasteful use of our hard-earned $ and yet blanche at the thought of paying thousands of dollars to stay healthy and alive – we have been conditioned to entitlement thanks to Medicare and health care insurance!
We must remember that we are human beings – we love the easy way out, the way that costs us little or nothing in self-control and self-accountability. This road leads to surrender of freedom as we grab the freedom from others to meet our needs.
Our country did not become great and wonderful because its founders took the easy way out. On the contrary. We have become soft and spoiled and self-seeking. We want security instead of LIFE. I’m reminded of a wonderful film, “Then She Found Me.” Helen Hunt plays a woman who is raised Jewish by her adoptive parents. In the beginning of the move, amidst the strains of lovely Klezmer music, Helen Hunt (main character) narrates a Jewish story about a father who is teaching his son to have more courage and be less afraid. “He puts his son on the second step and says, ‘Jump and I’ll catch you.’ “ Then on the third step and so on. She continues the story, “The boy jumped from a very high step – but this time, the father stepped back and the boy fell flat on his face. He picked himself up, bleeding and crying and his father said to him, ‘That’ll teach you.’“
At first I was appalled by this story and didn’t understand it. At the end of the film, however, Helen repeats the story and adds a coda. “When he [the father] caught him [the son], he [the son] was filled with love, and when he [the father] didn’t [catch the son], he [the son] was filled with something else, something more – LIFE. Amen!”