I said that years ago. Your system is unsustainable. It's going to fail, the only question is when.
Perhaps people in one of the States where there's citizen initiated legislation should start the ball rolling by passing a law saying that everyone has to pay for their own health cover, and no elected representative may have cover provided for themselves by any 3rd party.
California is big enough to be a good experiment. It'll never happen of course. More likely that a law making the Govt responsible for health insurance would pass - and lead to a collapse.
Entertaining for me anyway.
PDW
You make very good points.
Te cost of US health care did not escalate until the majority of the population started to get covered by a third party payer. When everyone was writing the checks themselves and paying the bills, there was much more scrutiny of costs and a tendency for people to question why we need every single test done.
When we paid our own bills, we had a better relationship with the health care providers, malpractice was much less, and we had better outcomes.
Where we are today is much different. Somebody else writes the checks so there is a complete disconnect between the services provided and the costs.
Having the friendly Congress critters have the same plan that they want us to have that is so wonderful is an excellent place to start.
Add to this about 40-47% of the US population does not pay any Federal income tax and many even receive an unearned income tax check. This makes a fertile segment of our population for the politicians to pander to for costly promises for the the other half to pay for, insuring the politicians re-election.
We where promised with the Obama care that you get to keep your doctor, costs savings would be $2500 per family, and it would fix everything. None of this happened, which I didn't expect to happen any way.
What I did despise was that my old deductible going to an Obama care compliant plan went from $2500 for the family to $5000 with a $2500 copay in addition to the pharmacy plan changed. All totaled, it was about an $8500 per year hit to my income with the switch.
There are several major things that are driving the US health care costs in an upward spiral.
One is that there is a complete disconnect between services provided to the patient and the costs of the health care. There is no financial incentive for a health care consumer to be judicious in there consumption of the services.
There is also an underlying problem in the US with a subliminal thought that with technology, we will live forever. I have a doctor friend that says that 100% of his patients will die. His job is to preserve his patients health and prolong their useful lives. This means that there is a time to be born, a time to live, and a time to die. If we as a society understood this better, we would make wiser lifestyle choices.
The other big item driving the health care costs is that in the US, emergency health care is supplied to everyone. That means poor, criminal, rich man-poor man, non citizens, and probably even Martians if one showed up. Much of the emergency room medicine is not paid for by the patients insurance because they have non or are Medicaid. That means that the taxpayer and insurance providers are picking up the tab.
Requiring a lower middle income person to buy an insurance plan with a huge deductible and a large monthly premium is just plain stupid. This group of people only have X number of dollars to spend per month. Diverting their health care dollars to a useless insurance plan is worthless as they can't pay the deductible since all of their available health care dollars went to the insurance premiums.
This means that they would be much better off financially if they were on welfare where everything is covered. This only exacerbates the total healthcare costs for everyone and increases the welfare roles.
Unlike many other countries, we do not have people dying in the hospital hallways because they do not have the cash or an insurance card. Not to pick on Mexico but unless you can pay, there will be no services provided, especially if you are a non-citizen. Mexican citizens that I work with tell me this often and that we, the US needs to keep some perspective on our health care costs vs services provided.
Technology costs money. This means that much of the R&D costs are being shifted to the insurance providers. This is why many of our new meds cost what they do and yet, you can buy them outside of the US at a significant discount. In essence this implies that much of the R&D that the US develops is being carried by the US health care system. When the US can no longer support the existing system, the rest of the world will then see their costs jump and new technology start to slow down.
Ultimately, the only way to control health care costs is to limit how much is spent. That means that we have to get off the open checkbook wagon. We need to provide a financial incentive for people to not want to spend needless dollars on unwarranted expenses.