[quote=AN]
I think both side can agree that we’re not heartless, regardless of political party line. Why can’t they all just sit down, investigate what are the top 10 reason for the rising healthcare cost and create 10 bills to fix those 10 problem. Would that be so hard?[/quote]
Yeah because most of the problems with rising health care costs have a strong lobby to protect their piece of the healthcare spending pie. Every dollar spent on healthcare is going into somebody’s pocket. The ACA is basically the lets throw money at the problem of rising costs rather than addressing the primary reasons for rising costs. We’ll hope and pray that insurance exchanges will drive the price of insurance down but we can’t guarantee that. Some of the big ones for rising prices would be
1) Getting rid of cost shifting in billing practices. Don’t let hospitals provide the same services for different prices depending on who’s paying.
2) Tort reform/Malpractice cases. Certainly there’s going to be cases of gross negligence that need recourse but when you’re taking a drug or having a procedure done that involves known risks you shouldn’t get to sue when one of those risks materializes.
3) Remove the ban on re-importation of drugs and medical devices. This is similar to 1 but why do American’s have to pay the drug manufacturer 10 times the cost of the same drug that the Canadian government pays.
Of course you can keep going on this trajectory of 10% increases in health care costs every year and let the healthcare system blow itself up. Then move to a single payer system which has it’s flaws (the primary one is some form of rationing) but it’s better than what we have now.
