I've never understood why America's outstanding talents in so many other market forces is so dismally incapable of fixing our medical system as it exists now.
I believe it comes down to our expectation. For the last 30 years, health-care costs have been rising 6 percent to 8 percent a year—more than double the inflation rate in the rest of the economy—because demand keeps outstripping supply.
As people's real income rises, they expect more medical care; our society is aging, so people need more care; and with new technologies treating formerly intractable conditions, people want more care.
In practice, almost everyone, insured or not, has access to health care, especially in emergencies. (By law, an ER in the US cannot turn away a sick patient.)
Insurance affects how much people actually use health services:
The access of the uninsured involves inconveniences and costs that encourage them to underconsume medical services, sometimes with grim results.
By contrast, some people with insurance often have such broad access that many overconsume those services. People are running to the doc after two days of dealing with a viral upper respiratory infection. (I see this a lot) . Or they want a 1000 dollar MRI for a sprained achilles tendon or rotator cuff. These consumption patterns drive the price increases that ultimately shrink insurance coverage.
As a society we determine how much health care we want . Unfortunately, our desires have no relation to what we would spend.
This is what makes us different from socialized medicine. The current system has no balances.
Our health care insurance system is broken and other countries do get more bang for their buck when it comes to medicine . The first step is to admit our health care system is in shambles and needs fixing, but some people still have their heads stuck in the sand!
Like most of the doctors in that survey I favor a national health insurance (Heck we already have it for the elderly and the poor in the form of Medicaid and Medicare) and tort reform so physicians can go back to practicing medicine, not legal medicine (ie: overordering tests to cover your A$$) in addition, any real medicine reform ( wether it is national health insurance or otherwise) we also need to be talking about making medical education cheaper, (so doctors aren't saddled with huge debts), tort reform so doctors don't have to garner a certain wage just to pay malpractice premiums etc.
Turbo-1 hit the nail on the head. Our 4 physician practice has an army of 32 , most of whom are not medical employees, who have to deal with the morass of insurances and and their different rules,full time coders, full time medicare insurance billers, full time medicaid billers, full time collections filers, 6 check in / check out people who have to figure out if we can run their blood work in house, or send to quest labs or can we do a treadmill test in house or do we send to the hospital, can i do a skin biopsey or do i have to send to derm etc. etc. One national insurance would save me the expense of hiring so many personell who need health insurance, dental, retirement planning, workman;s comp, disability, unemployment tax etc.
Besides, there is truly no such thing as Universal Health care system that does not involve a healthy private paying sector where if you have the money , you can purchase the type of health care you want. In Britain, there is a healthy private sector that employs almost half of the health care workers.
http://www.medrants.com/index.php?s=...&submit=Search under British NHS. In Canada, you just drive over to America!
