- If you want to fix the disaster that is called the American
healthcare system, the first thing to do is to clearly point out what its
major failings are, and there are two of these.
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- The first is cost. America is the most expensive or
one of the most expensive places in the world to get sick or injured. The
corollary of that is that it is one of the best places to make a killing
if you are in the medical business, whether as a doctor, a hospital company,
a pharmaceutical firm or a nursing home owner.
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- The second is access. One in six Americans-a total of
50 million people at latest count-have no way to pay for that care. Too
young for Medicare, too "well off" for Medicaid, but too poor
to buy private health insurance or too sick to be admitted into a plan,
or employed by a company that doesn't provide health benefits, these people
get no medical care until they get so sick that they are brought into a
hospital emergency room where they get treated (often too late) at public
expense, or at the hospital's expense, with the cost shifted onto taxpayers
or onto insured patients' premiums...
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- Any reform of this atrocious "system" must
address these two major failings or it is no reform at all.
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- And that's where all the various versions of Obamacare
fall flat.
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- Simply put, you cannot solve either of these problems
by leaving the payment system for medical care in the hands of the private
insurance industry, since the whole paradigm of insurance is to make money
by keeping high-risk people out of the insured pool, and by keeping reimbursements
and coverage for premium payers as low as possible.
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- For the rest of this story, please go to:
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- http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/325
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