The Brits have bad teeth for sure. And they don’t look healthy generally speaking. Maybe it’s the rain. Or maybe because I’m from sunny Southern California.
.. and the Brits have Universal Health care. The problem is that the price is driven below the cost to the dentist, so you don’t have many new dentists entering the field.
As for general health, the human body has a great capacity to heal itself if you don’t screw with it. Unfortunately too many doctors screw with it I’m not saying all, but too many doctors feel compelled to do something when nothing may actually be better. Factors contributing to this may include profit motive, reducing liability or patient demanding that the doctor do something.
Right now, the insured are subsidizing the uninsured.
This is a falsehood spread by the insurance companies. If you remember back in time, it is the same falsehood used to push for mandatory auto insurance in California. The promise was that auto insurance rates would drop after passage. They didn’t. The public in California then pushed for an insurance commissioner. I think the first guy holding that position was John Garamendi. We got a ‘token’ reduction in auto insurance costs.. but nothing real, and yet another politician got a government paycheck.
If you look at hospital room costs (just for the room, they micro-bill everything else), they range from $3000/per night on up. Considering that most hospital rooms are double occupancy, the room is really costing people $6000 per night. If the cause was the uninsured, it would mean that up to 19 out of 20 people in the hospital are uninsured.
Being uninsured doesn’t mean you get a ‘free pass’. You get hounded by debt collectors on behalf of the hospital. Only when it is finally determined that it is un-collectible, or you have been bled dry after all sort of ‘collection fees’ have been racked up.. might they consider it a ‘charity act’ and listed on their expense as such.. which makes it tax deductible against the hospital’s revenues. An interesting note on ‘charity acts’ is that it also include costs on providing help (surgery etc) to need cases from other countries, as well as charitable contributions. The actual cost of the uninsured to a hospital is buried in the noise.
What might really help all of the health care costs, is to deal with $3000+/bed/day, $6000+/room/day costs ($90,000 – $180,000 per month). If hospital stays did not have this cost, health care would really not be that expensive. Nursing homes (nice ones) manage to provide own room in the cost range of $3500 to $5000/month.
The present bills do not address any of the costs of health care.. it only conceals it under a layer of insurance. This is guaranteed to do only one thing, make the true costs higher.
