Take a long look at the insurance industry, it depends on profits from NOT having to cover medical expense. Take a look at the medical industry, it depends on the insurance industry, medicaid, and medicare to not look at the charges. Example- my Mother was billed for a scheduled checkup she didn't have, she had passed away three months before.. My Father had the same scenario.. You have whole sections of the hospitals,and doctors offices, all geared to sort through all the different insurance policies, see which ones they can gouge, and which they can't, then you have those who don't pay. They slip into the emergency room, get their care and slip out, your tax dollars, insurance, and people like 360K pay the difference. You won't find a medicaid patient at the doctors office, they go straight to the emergency room with their hangnail, their colds, and scratches. All paid for with our dime...
When Tiawan was looking at different ways to upgrade their medical system someone asked them about the American example, they said "Thats a perfect example to stay away from."... They went to a single payer system.
Our medical community is a for profit enity, they are not their to care for the patient. You go to the hospital for nursing care, not doctor care, they do a short procedure, and the understaffed nurses bring you back to health.. Another way to make more money, cut staff, some nurses are taking care of over ten patients per nurse! If you think thats OK, try to work and have ten people on your butt all day..
Our medical costs are high because of all of the above factors, and one more, GREED.. People will spend their last dollar on their health, an do...
My Father was Navy, he spent thirty years in the service of this country, my Mother followed him around as a RN, she worked in many government hospitals, in fleabag corners of the world all her life.. Mom and Dad had very little life savings when they retired, they were nomads, they never asked anything from this nation, never wanted welfare, or handouts, worked hard long hours. My father passed in 91, my mother lived on until 2009, she was blind for her last fifteen years, and my wife and I did her shopping, paid her bills and did our best to make her comfortable, she was always upbeat, loved her dirty jokes, and shot of whiskey in the evening..
She became sick her last year, pnemonia, and a perforated bowel, she decided to go to a nursing home, the nursing homes would not take Medicare, or Tricare, so she had to go on medicaid.. She had signed over most of her life savings to the wife and I a year before, which we kept in trust for her, but not within the timeline that medicaid requires (five years). So no matter that WE had taken care of her for fifteen years, we did not deserve this money in their eyes.. So I handed over her and Dads life savings to the nursing home, before I did this the director of the nursing home told me they would put my mother out on the curb if I didn't!!! It was the closest I have ever come to strangling a woman with my bare hands!
After all this my Mother lived for another two months died of pnemonia she caught in that crappy nursing home, she recieved two weeks of Medicaid!!!!!!!
So folks, work all your life, never ask nuts from anybody, and this is what you have to look forward to, hand your money, home, and all your stuff over to a hospital... Not me, I like the line, "Take a gun and the horse up into the hills, send the horse back!"..... Sorry for the long rant, but I get a tad pissed.. Single payer now, everybody pays, everything is covered, from birth to death...