Posted on 03/14/2022 10:55:06 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
>>> What can be done to lower health care costs? <<<
Setting aside VA and Native American health insurance, we have a three tier system - Private, Medicare, and Medicaid. Each have different reimbursement rates. For example, the same X-ray costs $1000 for private patients, $600 for Medicare, and $250 for Medicaid patients.
Obama radically expanded Medicaid including 1-2 million illegal aliens per year. Half of all babies are born under Medicaid. Using the same example above, we have the same number of broken arms, but more and more are reimbursed at the lower Medicaid rates so hospitals and providers are forced to increase costs to private insurance patients, and to a lesser extent, Medicare patients.
So, it won’t happen … but the only way to “lower health care costs” is to deport all the illegal aliens on Medicaid, make the program temporary until the patient can find an employer-based policy, and radically reduce Medicaid enrollment.
Don’t disagree with all of that, but I read a piece a while back that seemed to identify another major disfunction with what we call medical “insurance” in this country. What started out being sold as insurance in this context was really better thought of as pre-paid medical services through large hospital systems, and that has persisted to the present day.
That’s compounded by some of the obstacles to price transparency that you reference, but they really seem like very closely related problems. I don’t imagine that I know enough about how things are structured to have a solution, but introducing market forces has got to be the only way to avoid the top-down rationing that Governor Newsom’s plan, or the full single-payer plans rely on.
EVERYTHING is UNION & they want to control costs??????
HA HA HA HA HA HA
In my job before I retired I had the opportunity to take a look at the finances of several large hospitals.
The biggest surprise (and there are a lot of surprises) is that hospitals are not really businesses as they are traditionally understood.
They are a location where lots of wildly different businesses are located.
Each type of service has its own costs, staff, patients etc—and they are amazingly independent of each other.
If hospitals want to be profitable all they need to do is eliminate any businesses that are money losers.
Regulation of any these businesses by .gov just changes who are the winners and losers.
It is a crazy business—ridiculously complex—and constantly undergoing radical change.
Rationing. When you hit a specific $$$ level, you’re done. Brilliant bumpkin.
I thought Obamacare and Roberts fixed the problem.
I am paying $803 a month for my insurance.
The illegals pay nothing!!
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