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To: helper
I would say that the rank and file of health care are not going along with it.

Just the handful of sell-outs at the top of each organization, be it a hospital, HMO, corporation, etc.

Briefly, there's a triumvirate of organizations who maintain the status quo.

1.) Insurers like to keep the bills nice and high, so as to keep their percentage cut large.

2.) Hospitals like to keep the bills nice and high, so as to keep facility fees huge. (My old hospital would charge Medicaid or an insurance company $3000 for a one-night stay in the hospital for a tonsillectomy patient. When the cash-paying plastic surgery patients and their surgeons needed THE SAME exact service, the quote they got from the hospital was $300!!--ONE TENTH!! That will give you some idea of the REAL price of a night's stay in the hospital. It's high but not crazy high.)

3.) Third, the Federal and State governments like to keep the bills nice and high, because it justifies tons and tons of administrative spending, posturing, and gives them ammo to keep the voters in a low-grade panic about the future of health care. (Guess which party traditionally benefits from such panic-mongering.)It also gives them a huge pool of lobby-dollars from the other two oligarchs in the triumvirate. It's all very corrupt, you see.

The solution to all this is not banning health insurance, rather, free health insurance, with the natural outcome being Medical Savings Accounts, and high deductibles: These lead straight to low premiums, and also lower routine costs.

Health care could easily cost one third of what it costs now, with huge incentives possible for joggers and other health-conscious persons. Nothing like that is being explored under the current cartel system, I wonder why.

Just let the market do its thing.

Oh yeah, this just in... Congress is trying to stamp out the overwhelmingly-popular Medical Savings Accounts, which have heretofore been allowed to only a handful (less than a million) citizens on a "trial basis".

Why do you think the triumvirate is so threatened by MSAs?

Not too hard to figure out.

18 posted on 05/02/2002 10:48:20 AM PDT by caddie
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To: caddie
When I said "free health insurance," I meant, "Liberate the health insurers entirely from any sort of government regulation, and let them devise insurance products that might appeal to a discerning public."
19 posted on 05/02/2002 10:52:22 AM PDT by caddie
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