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Originally Posted by Donnageddon
Kaz, in what way does your insurance company "run your healthcare". What is their "experience" with healthcare? How does their involvement effect your healthcare?
In what way do you think "government" would "run your healthcare" under the current proposals?
Wouldn't it be nice to get the Insurance company bureaucrats out of your doctors hair?
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I work for one of those evil insurance companies. What is my companies "experience" with health care? Well, we employ doctors and nurses who work with outside doctors to make the decisions about what kinds of procedures are covered and to what degree. Those types of decisions are not made in a vacuum by business types. (I'm sure there are financial guys involved too, my point is that there are doctors involved on both sides of the negotiating table.)
The whole point of insurance is to create a fund to cover care for all the members. And a good chunk of the medical care needed by the insured isn't provided by the costs of membership - insurance premiums are invested so that those funds grow, and there is more for everyone.
I can't speak for every insurance company certainly, but the one I work for is a not-for-profit company, which means we are limited in the amount of profit we are allowed to make. Our goal is to make just a little bit more than it takes to cover costs, and that "little bit" is put back into the system for a rainy day. I don't think I'm at liberty to share numbers on a public forum, but the percentage of premium dollars that are spent on non-healthcare items is a big deal to us, and something we try to drop every year. As an IT guy I definitely feel that - technology isn't a direct moneymaker, it's an expense. We look for every way to cut costs that we can find.
I'm not saying the system is perfect - it certainly isn't. And insurance companies are indeed part of the problem, in a way. Insurance companies attempt to control costs by stating how much they're willing to pay for a procedure, and providers agree not to charge more than the copay to the insured. So, hospitals raise prices on other parts of their services. A friend of mine recently had a 30 dollar charge on his bill to bring him two aspirin - obviously way more than the cost of the service. Looking at an itemized hospital bill is an eye-opening experience.
From what I can tell the root of a lot of our health care problems in the US is a lack of doctors, particularly family doctors (as opposed to specialists). When we moved to Vancouver (a large suburb of Portland, OR) we had trouble finding a family doctor that had openings for new patients. It wasn't because of money or our insurance (remember, I work for an insurance company!)....there simply aren't enough doctors in the area to provide care to the population. When we had our last child, the nurse at the birthing class mentioned that in some rural counties in Oregon there were women scheduling medically unnecessary c-sections because there was no on-call OB. The only way to make sure there was an attending OB at the birth of their child was to schedule surgery.
If there aren't enough doctors to go around it doesn't matter who is paying or how much.
And frankly, a lot of the reason that a lot of people in the US aren't happy about the idea of government run health care is that we have an inherent mistrust in the governments ability to intelligently manage ANYTHING. Congress has proved over and over again through the years and regardless of which party held a majority that they just can't spend enough. You might say that mistrust of government is a core American value. It wasn't all that long ago that we fought a Revolution over it, after all.