Quote:
Originally Posted by Spoon Man
The fact of the matter is that the money just isn't there to provide everyone with state funded health care. The money is barely there to provide everyone with schooling. We don't have the funds, which means that we have to sacrifice. Funding needs to get cut until we can get our budget back in order, and we can't do that if we are starting to spend more money.
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The money is there. The *management of resources* is not.
High school graduation rates have been dropping in the US for forty years. We spend twice as much now in *adjusted* dollars as we did then, and it's not getting more graduates, better-educated kids, or more overall literacy. The problem isn't money; it's that
what schools are designed to teach isn't reading & math.
Health care has the same problem--by funding *insurance* rather than care & prevention, we're throwing money at the wrong end of the problem. We're promoting the idea that people should gamble on being healthy, as if a healthy populace were a matter of good luck and special tricks, with prizes for the "winners," rather than a life-long plan for good health for almost everyone.
There will always be exceptions--people with diseases that very expensive treatments can only alleviate the symptoms of, accident victims who need expensive care to be barely functional again. But those aren't what's holding back our health care system.
What's killing us is people who avoid flu shots because the $25 co-pay and $20 flu shot (plus the loss of half a day of work) is more than they think they can afford this winter, and they don't notice how many $5 packs of antihistamines they bought instead. And whether or not "that's stupid of them," they're spreading flu to other people at the same time, and their productivity at work is down.
What's killing us is the $1000 emergency room visit for something that could've been treated for $75 if it'd happened during working hours. And the same symptoms, with a price tag of $15,000 including the ambulance trip to the hospital and extensive diagnostics because the person had no health care history on record so nobody could say quickly, "this is not pneumonia or cancer; it's allergies to the mold from the cheap hotel he spent last night at; give him some steroids and let him sleep it off."
By making health care an optional luxury service, instead of something everyone expects to grow up with, we've made it much more expensive than it needs to be.