I agree that the debate should simply be that US healthcare is broken, plain and simple and how do we fix it. By polarizing it with two sides you weaken the public option. Is there really two sides? It’s broken and needs to be fixed so the debate should stick to that, it’s not as if there is NHC or keep what we’ve got. Most know that costs have spiraled out of control and continue to get crazier every year. Most know that what used to be a good system, now simply excludes too many to be called a functioning system at all.
The debate should not be NHC or NOT NHC. It should be NHC or some other complete revamp.
I have what would be called good health insurance in today’s environment. I’ve always had good insurance, yet I have seen the cost of that go parabolic in the past 5-7 years and seen many around me who once were covered lose their insurance because it just got so expensive.
A family member had a MINOR fall which really needed no medical attention but over-zealous ambulance drivers and ER folks turned it into a feeding frenzy on my insurance. The result was nearly $50k and my insurance company looked at the bill, including $99 for 1 Ibuprofen (no shit!) a bunch of stupid tests (, none of which showed an injury of any kind) and decided this was over billing bunk and did not pay it all. So now the hospital is after me for nearly $5k. Remember I have good insurance.
Moral of this story is hospitals are not dumb, if they are forced to treat people with no money or insurance for free, then they will make up the difference elsewhere (from the insured). It does not take a rocket scientist to see that will result in abuses to insurance. The system is just broke.
As far as doctors go, I would guess that those who are compassionate about healing and serving man kind would love a public option and those who are in it for the money will be on the side that pays best?
“Unless you’re a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you’re one illness away from financial ruin in this country,” says lead author Steffie Woolhandler, MD, of the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass. “If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy, and that’s the major finding in our study.”
Dr. Woolhandler and her colleagues surveyed a random sample of 2,314 people who filed for bankruptcy in early 2007, looked at their court records, and then interviewed more than 1,000 of them.
They concluded that 62.1% of the bankruptcies were medically related because the individuals either had more than $5,000 (or 10% of their pretax income) in medical bills, mortgaged their home to pay for medical bills, or lost significant income due to an illness. On average, medically bankrupt families had $17,943 in out-of-pocket expenses, including $26,971 for those who lacked insurance and $17,749 who had insurance at some point.
Overall, three-quarters of the people with a medically related bankruptcy had health insurance, they say.
“That was actually the predominant problem in patients in our study—78% of them had health insurance, but many of them were bankrupted anyway because there were gaps in their coverage like co-payments and deductibles and uncovered services,” says Dr. Woolhandler. “Other people had private insurance but got so sick that they lost their job and lost their insurance.” http://news.health.com/2009/06/04/medical-bills-bankruptcies/
