How do I despise the USSA’s socialist health care system? Let me count the ways!
Nah, I won’t tally ’em up this morning—I’ve far too much to do to invest time into such an endeavor—but here are two more reasons I’ve encountered recently.
First, market stupidity at its finest: Cause of Death: Sloppy Doctors [all emphasis mine].
Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.
To address the problem–and give the push for electronic medical records a shove–a coalition of health care companies and technology firms will launch a program Tuesday to enable all doctors in the U.S. to write electronic prescriptions for free. .... "Thousands of people are dying, and we've been talking about this problem for ages," says Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, a Chicago-based health care technology company, that initiated the project. "This is crazy. We have the technology today to prevent these errors, so why aren't we doing it?"
One of the reasons is that doctors haven't invested in the needed technology, so it's being provided to them. The $100 million project has drawn support from a variety of partners, including Dell, Google, Aetna and numerous hospitals. "Our goal long-term is to get the prescription pads out of doctors' hands, to get them working on computers," says Scott Wells, a Dell vice-president of marketing. Google is designing a custom search engine with NEPSI to assist doctors looking for health data. Insurance companies such as Aetna have pledged to provide incentives for physicians using e-prescription systems. ....
By providing doctors with free tools and support–and perhaps a little prodding from the big insurers who pay the bills–the NEPSI alliance hopes to encourage a quickening in adoption of electronic prescribing.
Nothing is free, especially in health care. Of course Dell, Google, et al. are in on this—it’s great PR and they will probably make some money on the project. Why else would these companies want to try to force this switch on doctors?
It seems to me there’s a much easier way to accomplish this, without consumers being burdened with the costs of this “free” distribution. Educate patients. An individual ought to know the brand and generic names of the med(s) he’s prescribed, as well as dosage and what it ostensibly treats. When a doctor writes a new script, the patient should write down the names of the new med and the dose on a separate piece of paper, so that he can check it against what the pharmacy gives him. That would go a very long way toward eliminating this type of medical error. More specific to this situation, though, patients should know that sloppy handwriting isn’t just a joke—and if a doctor isn’t willing to take the effort described above, or use an electronic system for writing prescriptions, then the patient should seek care elsewhere. An exodus of cash over bad policy gets attention. (Of course, if docs switch to the electronic system, asking about the privacy implications of such a move is important.)
Second: Co-Payments for Expensive Drugs Soar. This is a long NYT article, and I’ve not even glanced at its second page yet, but here’s an extensive quote from the first page [all emphasis mine]:
Health insurance companies are rapidly adopting a new pricing system for very expensive drugs, asking patients to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for prescriptions for medications that may save their lives or slow the progress of serious diseases.
With the new pricing system, insurers abandoned the traditional arrangement that has patients pay a fixed amount, like $10, $20 or $30 for a prescription, no matter what the drug’s actual cost. Instead, they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs, usually 20 to 33 percent, which can amount to thousands of dollars a month.
The system means that the burden of expensive health care can now affect insured people, too.
No one knows how many patients are affected, but hundreds of drugs are priced this new way. .... There are no cheaper equivalents [generics] for these drugs, so patients are forced to pay the price or do without. ....
The system, often called Tier 4, began in earnest with Medicare drug plans and spread rapidly. ....
Tier 4 is .... the fastest-growing segment in private insurance, Mr. Mendelson said. Five years ago it was virtually nonexistent in private plans, he said. Now 10 percent of them have Tier 4 drug categories.
Private insurers began offering Tier 4 plans in response to employers who were looking for ways to keep costs down, said Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans .... When people who need Tier 4 drugs pay more for them, other subscribers in the plan pay less for their coverage.
But the new system sticks seriously ill people with huge bills, said James Robinson, a health economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is very unfortunate social policy,” Dr. Robinson said. “The more the sick person pays, the less the healthy person pays.”
Traditionally, the idea of insurance was to spread the costs of paying for the sick.
That noble goal might have been the case in private, voluntary arrangements, but the nanosecond insurance became an industry, the goal switched to making a profit. (Interested readers may find The History of Health Care Costs and Health Insurance [PDF] from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute a worthwhile investment of time.) Notice that nowhere in the quotation above is there concern for individuals’ health—it’s all about costs and who pays. And notice the “expert” decrying the fact that those who use goods and services are paying more than those who aren’t using them.
So much for that “dying for lack of health insurance” canard, eh? The bloated, coercively socialist health insurance industry is a major contributor to the decline in quality of care and the steep rise in prices. It needs to die.
In a competative market...
..... how much would the Tier 4 meds cost? I read the NY Times article a few days ago, and was similarly appalled.
Traditionally, the idea of insurance was to spread the costs of paying for the sick. When I've applied for insurance, I wasn't signing on for that, nor was that so-called concept shared with me as a consumer.
When Lew worked for an employer he was used to keep the company plan in a lower bracket. Our insurance costs grew to be so prohibitive, despite what his employer chipped in, so he asked if he could receive a portion of the money they used to pay for his coverage, rather than the coverage itself. Since it was touted as part of his pay and a few other employees received cash payments instead of being on the company plan (spouses coverage was used by these employees), we thought it was a reasonable request. That way we could shop around and decide how to handle our medical care independently. His request was denied and told they needed him to help lower the company's aging employee status ( the other employees who opted out were older, foreign and had current health issues).
It's all a shell game.