Affordable Healthcare and Financial Security

[Astronuc]

Rather than continue the healthcare and other issues in the Vote Republican thread, I decided to open a separate thread. These two issues are mentioned in a number of other threads related to economics, politics and role of government in the lives of citizens.

AARP is now emphasizing healthcare and financial security.
http://www.aarp.org/issues/dividedwefail/

• strengthening Social Security
• making affordable, quality health care available for all
• making prescription drugs more affordable for all
• creating incentives to save for retirement, or
• expanding job opportunities so people can keep working and contributing to society as they get older.

Ostensibly, if everyone or perhaps the vast majority could save for retirement, we would not need social security.

If everyone or the vast majority observed a healthy lifestyle, the cost of healthcare would be much less, and the widespread use of prescription drugs would not be necessary.

Job security is tied to financial security. Those in their 50's face more competition from those with less experience and lower salaries. I have many colleagues who have taken early retirement, as opposed to being terminated, as large companies cut costs. Then those reitrees are hired back to do the same work at lower cost - and much reduced benefits.

 

[edward]

The emphasized sentence sums up the situation. note: the article is from 2001. Costs have gone up greatly since then.

Marcia Angell, MD
Editor-in-Chief
New England Journal of Medicine

We certainly are in a health care crisis. If we had set out to design the worst system that we could imagine, we couldn't have imagined one as bad as we have. Here's a system in which we spend over twice what the next most expensive country spends on health care -- that's Switzerland. We spend roughly $4500 for every American, whether they have insurance or not. Switzerland spends maybe $2500 for every citizen. Canada spends maybe $2,000. Great Britain, poor little Great Britain, spends about $1,000 for every British citizen. And what do we get for it? What do we get for that $4500? Well, we certainly don't get our money's worth. We have roughly 43 million people with no insurance whatsoever, and among the rest of us, many of us are underinsured. That is, we have shrinking packages. This might be covered, but that won't be covered.

emphasis mine

http://www.badfaithinsurance.org/reference/GMCO/0006a.htm

I read somewhere that the leading cause of personal bankruptcy is related to medical issues.

We still have a minority of people who think that any overhaul of the medical care system will be some sort of a a communist jack booted authoritarian system that won't let people choose their own doctors..

Leave off the word "communist" and that also describes the system we have now.

The majority now finally sees the light, but overcoming the lobbying power of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies will be an overwhelming task.

When your doctor mentions "specialist" or "special test", and then goes to a phone, he is not calling a specialist he is calling your insurance company. In many cases the call will be routed to India where some guy with no medical training will make the decision.

 

[edward]

Audits of Medicare payments made to hospitals are being outsourced to private companies. The big problem with this is that the companies are paid only on a commission basis. They have an incentive to reject pay outs made as far back as 2002.

WASHINGTON — U.S. taxpayers will end up paying millions of dollars in commissions to an Atlanta-based auditor even though the firm's wholesale rejections of Medicare claims from California rehabilitation hospitals are being reversed on appeal.

The rulings by administrative-law judges for the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals will restore money withdrawn from California hospitals, some of which trimmed services to Medicare patients as a result of the reviews.

But PRG-Schultz International, which is paid up to 25 to 30 cents for each dollar of Medicare spending it identifies as wrongly paid, can keep its bounty as long as its findings are sustained through the first two levels of administrative review.

The company seemed to zoom in on rehabilitation after Knee and Hip replacement surgery. This is outrageous, this type of surgery more than any other requires intensive physical therapy. Typically, from my own experience, after this type of surgery people are admitted to a rehabilitation facility where the usual stay is two weeks.

Its auditors rejected almost all the claims for patients admitted after knee- or hip-replacement surgery, saying in essence that the therapy the patients received was medically unnecessary and that they should have been treated through outpatient services or sent to nursing homes.

The idiots didn't factor in the risk of further injury by sending the patients home sooner, and nursing homes do not have the staff or the extensive rehab units that are need to do this type of physical therapy.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2003886857_mediaudit16.html

As the link state a class action law suit now requires Medicare to pay for the claims denied by this misguided company. The stinger is that the company gets to keep the money that they have already been paid.

It is time to stop this medical bounty hunting.

 

[edward]

Job Lock : Held Hostage By health Care

People are staying with less desirable jobs fearing a possible loss of health care. Economists are claiming this has a detrimental effect on the labor market.

Economists and academics call this phenomenon "job lock." Studies say it could reduce job mobility by up to 25%, according to Brigitte Madrian, a public policy and corporate management professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. A fluid labor market is viewed as a prime driver of U.S. economic growth relative to other industrialized countries.

Job lock creates friction by artificially tethering people to their jobs. Camden is one of a growing group of

CEOs--from the heads of the big auto companies to Starbucks Corp.'s (SBUX ) Howard Schultz to the Business Roundtable--who are pressing Washington to take action on this vexing issue. The only way to solve the stickiness in the labor market, Camden says, is to sever the link between jobs and health.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_05/b4019086.htm

 

[turbo]

Health care in the US is so expensive that it is cheaper for auto companies to open or expand plants in Canada instead of keeping the jobs here. Those are good-paying jobs being exported out of the US and reducing US tax revenues for the benefit of the health insurance companies. Where's the sense in that?