The best health insurance money can buy....

or ELSE!

WASHINGTON – First you paid to insure your car. Soon you may have to add health insurance premiums to that stack of monthly bills as well.

In a revamped health care system envisioned by senators, people would be required to carry health insurance just like motorists must get auto coverage now. The government would provide subsidies for the poor and many middle-class families, but those who still refuse to sign up would face fines of more than $1,000.

I know many of you out there think that we should all have health care( we do), but the system is not built to handle everyone getting a CAT scan for every headache, and doctors being human sometimes see head pain as such and not as a tumor.We have the best health system in the world.It is not broken. You can walk into any hospital or doctors office and be seen and tested and diagnosed in a few hours. Unlike England/Canada/and many other single payer countries, where there is a three week wait for non-emergency x-rays.
Democrats like to point out that back in the fifties care was 3-5% of a person's income, and today it is 18%(over a lifetime, one thing they DO NOT point out). What they seem to not notice, or ignore, is that is about the time that medicaid and medicare got into the act. Health insurance came along as well. Now people did not need to base health decisions on whether they could pay. The money came from some other source, out of this magical pot of cash that was not seen and for a few dollars a month you could see a doctor, go to the hospital, or just buy your little blue pill. When this happened, costs for care soared. People started living longer and more health issues popped up, so costs rose. Many people that would have previously died from a condition, had it diagnosed and were cured thus more people were living longer.This was a good thing, but with more people living longer a larger burden was being put on finances in the public and private sector.
Doctors started seeing more clients and were no longer restrained by the patients ability to pay and the number of tests being ordered went up.Tests also went up as doctors were being sued for "mal-practice" when all they really had done was misdiagnose something. Something that was put in place to punish gross negligence, has become some peoples(lawyers) way to a big payoff. A good example of this is when My son was a baby, he woke one night with a high fever, us being new parents and not knowing, panicked and took him to the emergency room. They ordered an X-ray, and several blood tests to say he had a high fever from a cold and gave him aspirin. A $700 bill for a cold. We paid $50 because of insurance. This doctor could have easily seen that it was just a child with a fever and ordered aspirin and saved 600 dollars. Now did he do this because he wanted to be sure it was just a fever, or to protect himself? We may never know, but the decision should be what is best for the patient.

In response to the rampant explosion of new tests and procedures, HMO's were created by insurance companies to try and curb some of the spending. People felt they were evil because some were told to cut spending at any cost and did at the expense of patients. Now the Feds want to step in and make health choices for you. This is no different than HMOs. Instead of some company deciding if you get reimbursed for the treatment, the government will decide if you need it and if they say no, you don't get it, at all. In England, there is a policy that if you get Cancer past a certain age, no treatment, and no matter how much money you have you cannot buy it.
What needs to happen is a fundamental change to insurance and tort law. Insurance needs to be changed to catastrophic events and medical savings accounts created.A portion is used to pay for the "insurance" and the rest is placed into your account to grow and for you to spend as you see fit. Just like 401ks, the money would build and when you needed it it would be there to pay your medical bills. This would introduce market forces back into the health care system and help lower costs as people would ask if I really need 15 blood tests run for the sniffles, since the money would come "out of pocket", but no one would feel they could not go since the insurance is there for if it involves hospital stays.
Second, Med icaid/care needs to be converted to a card like food stamps. If you are in the system you get a card and a monthly amount to spend as you see fit and the same rules would apply, if you don't use it, it grows.Again this would introduce market forces and make people pay attention to those bills they get.
Finally, the laws need to be reworked where doctors don't fear getting sued every time they see a patient. Remove what I like to call the "litigation lottery" and you will see a change in costs. Take punitive damages and have them be paid back into the system instead of to lawyers and litigators. Take away the big money and lawyers will stop taking the frivolous cases hoping to settle out of court.
One last note. If you really want to see what a one payer system (government run) would really look like, go into an emergency room on a Saturday night and try and be seen.That is the future of government health care.