bad news from the medical front
by Bill at 8/30/2004 03:20:00 PM
the amont of uninsured just keeps growing. Just last year when I prepared a lecture on medical social justice issues it was at 43.4 million; now it is even higher. The rate of the uninsured has been grwoing at nealy 1 million per year over the last decade, the rate has increasaed slightly over the last four years. The fact that this has been a ongoing problem for a long time attests to it not be a partisan issue. I am for universal coverage. The amount to be gained by better health care coverage is staggering. And the amount of waste in our current system is also staggering. We already have a rationed system, but one based arbitrarily on income and insurance coverage instead of evidence based need. but i conceed that there are many possible solutions, from the right, left and fringes. anyone else have anything to add to our collective pot?
One part of the problem is a positive feedback loop (and positive feedback doesn't mean it's good!). People lose their health insurance because they lose their jobs. This causes the overall cost of healthcare to rise (catastrophic expenses are much greater than preventative expenses, and the first thing people without insurance skip is preventative healthcare). High healthcare costs make employers reluctant to hire new employees, or they reduce or do away with health insurance entirely. Which makes healthcare costs rise...
A greater role for government in providing healthcare for everyone could both improve the per capita cost of healthcare (compare others costs to US costs) and increase the number of employed and raise their wages (employers will at least have the option of passing healthcare savings to their employees).
thanks for the input Jeff; i've have encountered that solution before and I don't dismiss it (something needs to be tried and i doubt the American public is ready for universal coverage...socialism, communism, lack of choice, arghh!). I also enjoyed your link to the heritage site; one in nie people lacked coverage for two or more years, really? yes the majority of poverty stricken people (making less than 14,280 per year as an individual) are transiently poor, but the majority of uninsured do not fit into that category (the truly poor often qualify for some sort of government sponsored insurance). and many who lack insurance could probably afford it, as you hinted at. still the waste bothers me, if the state could mandidate some sort of standarized billing system, more standarized than the present HCFA system, it would save us enormous amounts of monies in billing (there are more people working in billing in my office than there are providers, also telling is that Manhattan general has a billing and coding staff of about 300, while comparable Toronto general has a billing staff of three). thanks again for you input.
Though many of the insured don't meet the government requierments of poverty they are still poor. Kaiser Family Foundation has some good data on the uninsured here. KFF has the word "family" in their name, so the can't be all bad right. Right now I have a picture of Maude Flanders shrieking "what about the children!", or was that Reverend Lovejoy's wife.
Definetly Jeff, there is a lot of profit ot be made by the status quo, from Unions and from insurance carriers; but was it Maude Flanders or Mrs. Lovejoy?!
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