US Healthcare- Who Pays for this Boondoggle?
March 30, 2017
"Every family is one serious medical event
away from financial destruction."
Glen, a recently retired American,
gives his reaction to the current US debate
over health insurance.
I welcome reader views. (hmakow@gmail.com)
by Glen
(henrymakow.com)
Obamacare sucks a big one. I recently retired and will be paying close to $750.00 per month for health insurance for my wife and I. While I was employed, I was fortunate enough to work for a fairly large local government that had a health care plan. My premium while I was working was $160 a month, while my employer chipped in $644 a month for my health care insurance as a paid benefit.
I have a retired single woman friend whose premium was $150.00 per month before Obamacare. She is now paying $530.00 per month with a $7000.00 deductible per year, and it is still going to go higher. Freakin' insanity.
My older brother came down with severe pneumonia and had to be helicoptered from his small town to a larger city. It was a 112 mile flight. The insurance company was billed $43,000 for the ride.
As for the ability to get good service in a timely manner; not going to happen. I recently had a partial knee replacement. It took 3 months to get a day surgery scheduled and done.
The cost of my surgery was somewhere around $30,000 dollars. It was day surgery and took about 2 hours to perform. The parts for the surgery (I call it my knee rebuild kit, fit in a 6"x 8"x 4" box) came to a total of $14,000. At the time of this surgery I was still employed so my cost were minimal. My deduction was $100 dollars and my co-pay was $500 dollars.
I will be getting my other knee done under retirement insurance. My deductible will now jump to $1500 and my co-pay will now come in at $5500. If you do the math, I will now pay $6400 dollars out of pocket. Again it will be a 3 month wait.
I don't know how it works for the "poor" and "dis-advantaged" but the average working Joe Blow is paying through the nose and out the ass.
The problem we have with health care cost in America is not a new one. It has been rising at a steady rate for years, but under Obama, it has sky rocketed to insane heights. The system is so corrupted by now I really don't how any one man or one bill can straighten it out. All I know is every family is one serious medical event away from financial destruction.
Of course our politicians and 1 percenters will always have the very best care by the very best doctors. As for our politicians, It one of the perks for working on the behest of big medical, big pharma, and big insurance. As for the top 1 percenters, they have plenty green they have made off the backs of the ever diminishing middle class working man and woman.
David Brooks pretty much nailed it when he stated: "The Ryan health care plan punishes the very people Trump and Bannon had vowed to help. It would raise premiums by as much as 25 percent on people between 50 and 64, one core of the Trump voter base. It would completely hammer working-class voters whose incomes put them just above the Medicaid threshold. The Trump health care and budget plans will be harsh on the poor, which we expected. But they'll also be harsh on the working class, which we didn't."
MEXICO
Jim Stone is a former American who now lives in Mexico and is the owner of the alternative news site jimstone.is. Jim has had first hand experience with health care in both countries and compares the service and cost in both countries. Here is a look at Jim's experiences:
BOTTOM LINE: AMERICAN MEDICAL IS A CRIMINAL SYSTEM. THERE IS NO CONCEIVABLE EXCUSE FOR IT. IT IS A MASSIVE EXTORTION RACKET. THEY TAKE PEOPLE IN DIFFICULT SITUATIONS THAT ARE CHEAP TO FIX, AND DESTROY THEM. ...
The criminal racket HAS TO STOP. IF TRUMP WANTS TO ADDRESS THE REAL MEDICAL PROBLEM AMERICA HAS, HE HAS TO OPENLY STATE THAT THE ENTIRE SYSTEM IS A FILTHY ROTTEN CRIMINAL EXTORTION RACKET FROM TOP TO BOTTOM, AND BEGIN CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS.
NO OBAMACARE. NO RYANCARE. Simply TOTALLY de-regulate medical, do the proper jailings and let competition do it's job. THAT is the real health care fix.
I would never believe this if I was not in Mexico to see it for myself. Contrary to what you are told in the scamming MSM, Mexicans are not walking around spewing disease and dropping body parts. Their medicine here is more than equal to America's and it is actually affordable with no insurance or government subsidy at all.
Contrary to what you are brainwashed to believe, America has horse crap medical care. Dark dungeon spooky hospitals that stink, are proven to not be sanitary, and present like death centers. Hospitals don't have the same feel in Mexico, they, aside from whatever is wrong with you to put you there, are quite cheery. Yes, they all have WIFI that people use the whole day from their beds if they are able to.
I have had a medical incident here that would have destroyed me in America, yet medicine is SO CHEAP all I had to do is say I had a problem, and people who read this site took care of it in a day. That was nice to have happen. But it also shows that medicine in Mexico is affordable. My problem was not "cheap" but I am certain it would have been end-of-life in America. $50,000 AT LEAST, with no real cure, only symptom management. The diagnosis for the latest problem was 20 pages long! The problem was so technical that everything had to be analyzed, including things like ph balance, blood toxin load, exact mineral levels to see what was doing what, I saw the diagnostic list and can't even begin to say everything that was on it. Stuff you'd never even think about. Caveat: She kept the list. She wanted me as a permanent patient. So what if she is going to fix problems (she obviously did) and not just manage symptoms for max profit.
Mexican medical costs for services you can cross reference with American prices easily, these prices are not subsidized or discounted, or in "cheap hell holes", these will be done in top level "cheery" "marriott" type hospitals:
Sonogram, complete with all print outs: $10-20
X-ray, complete with the plate/film/whatever it is called, it will be at least 11X17 in size: $20-30.
Cat Scan: Various prices, but less than $100.
MRI in the latest newest 2014 model GE MRI "donut" machine with 3 teslas or more: $150 - 250
Open bed MRI: Up to $350. These are used for comfort or when someone is too claustrophobic to handle a donut MRI.
These prices are current. Go check them out in the U.S. and see what your scam level is set at.
BOTTOM LINE: MEDICAL REFORM IN AMERICA EQUALS ENFORCEMENT OF ETHICS LAWS AND LITTLE ELSE. If this is not done, the problem will not be fixed AT ALL no matter what "Trump dream care" ends up being.
--
Related-
Healthcare Fiasco Explained - Basically whites paying for blacks
Ann Coulter - The solution is free competition
Makow comment- You can't add 30 million low to no income Americans to the rolls without premiums going through the roof. I favour a single payer system to look after these people. Use the $54 billion they just added to the war budget. Strange that Trump has not made a statement on the philosophical basis of his healthcare tweak.)
First Comment from Don K
Obamacare was the globalists/shadow gvnt's attempt to turn American healthcare like the British healthcare which is completely socialist (the "national health service"/NHS) - whereby 75% of workers in the NHS are overworked foreigners all clinging to their gvnt jobs and provide a TERRIBLE service (not really because of them, but because the system is designed to make it terrible; everything that Americans are only now just experiencing that brits have gotten used to for years like onesizefitsall prescriptions, long wait times, poor customer service, illogical pricing structure, huge corruption and safety concerns etc). But because the majority of Brits are in the worst medical shape of the planet (its not just their teeth anymore), they're dependent on the NHS for perpetual treatment and so cling to it because they literally have no choice and have nothing else going for them (its like 1984 or Terry Gilliams 'Brazil' or the matrix in Britain now).
So now that has proven to be a failure, I hope America uses this only chance it has to privatize healthcare and force companies to operate only in the PRIVATE field as they're supposed to instead of relying on the public/gvnt for their monopolies to accept whatever they give out without option.
So how to pay for healthcare then? Easy. After removing most welfare and corporate gravy trains, healthcare will pay for itself via the open market and choice - as it should do. Simply revert it back to what it was pre-Obama. Nobody should be looking to the gvnt for help, only the guarantee that it'll step out of trying to run business and oppress the open market. And if the corporations try to fight it (ie Monstano, Merck etc) that is when the war begins of prosecuting the executives to force them into the free market or go out of business and into jail for crimes against humanity.
Another thing to be wary of is that the local councils aren't going to take this well and they'll try to raise local and property taxes on the residents to simply replenish any cuts so they don't have to enter the free market or relinquish any control/benefits, which again is something people on the local level would need to resist (I know this bc this is exactly what is happening here in Europe; the Brexit/conservatives are privatizing healthcare because its clearly unsustainable, but bc of huge backlash from the worthless socialists the 'compromise' is for the local councils to raise taxes and manage it on a local level so same shit but different form of distribution).
Dan said (April 1, 2017):
Glenn is essentially right. MOST of the astronomical cost of American health care is due to redundant services. This can be alleviated by a central information sharing system so that my general practitioner doesn't order the same blood tests I got last week from the specialist. Patients and doctors can do this manually as I did when my GP was going to do annual blood tests and I told her I just had them done - so I gave the hospital permission to simply send the blood results to my GP. That saved a redundant procedure that would been billed at over $500.