Guest Post by The Zman
Humans live in a finite world. The universe may be infinite, but the world of man is finite. There’s only so much stuff. Because there is only so much stuff, there’s always going to be a shortage of the stuff that people tend to like or need. It’s not always a desperate shortage, but there’s never enough so that everyone can take what they want. There’s always going to be one more hand reaching for the last item just after it is gone.
This is a basic axiom of life and one of the foundation truths of economics. It’s even a foundation truth of communism, which assumes scarcity can only be mitigated, but never fully eliminated, by the elimination of profit. Economists of all stripes work from the assumption that scarcity is an immutable fact of the human condition. The question they wrestle with is how to increase supply and distribute the results.
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What this means is that all goods and services must be rationed. Since there’s never enough to meet the maximum demand, there has to be some way to say “no” to people demanding the goods or services. The most common way to do this is price. The poor guy who wants a Mercedes is told he cannot have a Mercedes by the big numbers on the price tag. This is how the supply of luxury cars is rationed.
The other way to ration goods and services is for men with guns to take control of the supply and create rules for who can and who cannot have access to the stuff. Rocket propelled grenades are not very expensive. An RPG can be had for around $500 and the rounds are about $100. The government, at least in America, controls the supply of RPG’s and determines who can have them. In other words, the government rations the supply of RPG’s in America.
This is an iron law of economics. All goods and services are rationed. This is true for health care too. There are no exceptions to this law. Thus, the First Truth of Health Care: No health care plan or system can ever be taken seriously unless it addresses, up front, how it will say “No, you cannot have it” to people who want it. At some point, someone has to tell the patient they cannot have whatever it is they want or need.
In America, rationing is mostly done by price, but increasingly the state is taking over this role. In Britain, most people are denied services by the long lines for those services. The long wait times for basic services is a form of rationing. If you can deliver X per day and the demand is for 2X, you solve this by giving people numbers and having them wait a long time until their number is called. This is socialized medicine in nutshell.
The fact is, most people could pay out of pocket, for their health services. It is only when poor people get old or have accidents when they need someone to pay for their medical care. Most middle-class people should be able to put away a little every payday to reserve for their later years. That is, if they were not being taxed into poverty by the current system in America that has seen prices rise five times the inflation rate.
Thus, the Second Truth of Health Care: The current insurance model is just a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the health care industry, in order to cover the cost of poor people and the metastasizing layer of people who live off the system. Those is really just a tax. Most people use about 5% of their plan for themselves, the rest is used to pay for poor people and the army of people who work in the system.
That’s the thing politicians never want to discuss, which is the whole reason they are talking about health care in the first place. How does a modern society pay for the poor, who cannot afford needed medical services? How to we address the free riders on the system? More important, how much are we willing to pay for the health services to the poor? There’s a limit to all of this and that’s the question that always has to be answered.
Of course, one of the paradoxes of modern life is that you can get very rich off the poor, which is why liquor stores and furniture rental shops dot the ghetto. In the social welfare game, the point is to lay a massive guilt trip on the public, and grease the right political palms, in order to get the middle class to look the other way as their money is siphoned off for one program or another for the poor, always administered by a rich guy coincidentally.
Thus, the Third Truth of Health Care: Health services are a massive skimming operation. Today, the one area of the economy that “grows” is the health care industry. Every year, more and more people pile into that wagon, mostly in administrative roles. The number of nurses and doctors does not grow very much, but the number of bureaucrats grows like a weed.
Then you have the pill makers, machine makers, research people and lawyers. There are always lots and lots of lawyers. The health care industry is massive and government dependent. It’s why rub rooms are now called message therapy centers. They are angling to get it on the racket, by having their service declared an essential health care service. That way, you will be paying for some guy to get a happy ending.
That’s why reforming health care has become an impossibility. As soon as anyone makes any noises about fixing the system, the army of lobbyists, hired by every vested interest, shows up to bury the reformers. If they are not able to kill the idea of reform entirely, they set about corrupting it into another grift that their clients can use to get a free shot at your wallet. The only people not represented in these efforts are the voters. They get no say.
This is the main reason Trump’s efforts to address the problems of ObamaCare failed last week. What Ryan and the other crooks in the GOP were hoping to do is pass a bill that made it easier for their paymasters to skim money from the rate payers, while providing fewer services. Ryan’s bill was just an attempt to help the people feeding at the trough get a little fatter off the middle-class. Its failure suggests we have reached the end phase.
Talk to anyone responsible for paying health insurance premiums and they will tell you that the rates are reaching the point where they cannot be paid. When premiums are going up by multiples of inflation, there can be only one result. Once rates pass a certain level, people stop paying those premiums. You get black markets, non-compliance and a system that can only persist through brute coercion. Soon after you get collapse.
Things aren’t going to change till the patient is put directly in charge of the payment with a direct interest in containing costs working in his favor.
HSA’s do this, nothing else I can think of does (at least nothing else I see as viable, there may be something else as well).
Check out the Health Matching Account at nationalprosperity.com
You may never put another dollar into an HSA
So a family gets capped at 60,000 in the account to pay their medical bills.
What happens when someone needs, say, a $250,000 operation to save their life, the family comes up with the balance and the cost of the rest of their members as well?
Very little information on the internet that I can find, with two major information sites denied by my browser for security reasons since they are considered high risk sites. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Health+Matching+Account&ia=web
Since someone else has control of the money, if I understand what little info is available rightly, how is is guaranteed and under what authority is it disbursed?
What happens when the medical bill exceeds your HSA balance
The HMA is the foundation
Catastrophic coverage is a separate part to add
If it starts at $60,000 and pays up to $500,000 it runs $100 a person per person and $250 per family for a lifetime
The HMA lasts a lifetime
To learn more call our customer service at 877-850-8532
You also may want to watch the HMA video and review the FAQs
So basically, it’s just another proprietary HSA type product.
Z-man says:
“The current insurance model is just a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the health care industry, in order to cover the cost of poor people and the metastasizing layer of people who live off the system.”
Yep. Dareitiz. If only, one-day, politicians could acknowledge simple facts like internet bloggers, maybe the system could be saved. If only.
I have worked in the health care delivery system and have
seen first hand the outright theft of monies on many levels.
For awhile, docs were defrauding medicare to such an extent,
that hospital admin. was asking for nurses to help police them.
That went over like a lead balloon.
The fraudsters are less an entitled demanding patient but the greater
system that cheats on multiple levels and increasing costs for less.
I left early because we were eventually ordered (on pain of firing)
to call the doc at 3AM if necc., to report the withholding of a med or a
treatment. Some of us could not, in good conscience, give a frail
patient a med that was inappropriate, that obviously further weakened
them, at a cost of $100. No exaggeration. Doctors and well trained nurses
are leaving the system. Felons can be hired at will. People that don’t know
the difference between blood sugar and blood pressure are frequently
hired as well. Yet, there are good people working that will do their best
to do the right thing, and medical marvels still occur. Good luck.
State bluntly, health care in the U.S. is a racket. And the comment about “long lines” and waiting for treatment in countries where health care is a “right” is total b.s. Ask people in those countries if they’d prefer a system like the U.S. and they’ll laugh at you.
Obamacare and Ryancare neither did anything to reduce the costs, which is where the problem is. Get rid of the private insurance companies and you’ll be on the way to fixing it.
Greetings,
Since we are talking healthcare I thought I should mention an experience that happened to me just last night.
Come 12:30 last night, I found myself in the emergency room of our county hospital with kidney stones that were just tearing me up. I never had kidney stones pass before and I thought I could weather it without going to the hospital but boy was I wrong.
The reason I wish to avoid the emergency room at all costs is that it always looks like a Mexican Sunday Social in the emergency room. My last visit there saw me vomiting in a trashcan for more than 2 hours before anyone could have a look at me. Not so last night.
I was helped into the emergency room last night and I was shocked to find the waiting room empty. They took me back immediately where I quickly discovered that the other person back there with me was some white lady having complications with her diabetes. The staff, and there were lots of them, were all sitting around the nurses station cracking jokes and playing with their smart phones.
Why was the emergency room empty? I’ve heard rumors that our illegal population has curtailed their use of public services for fear of being discovered.
article about debt in the health care industry–it’s a bubble–
Another economic truth is that innovators, entrepreneurs, and the like creatively address shortages, higher costs, etc. for products and services IF THEY ARE ALLOWED TO. Government dictates who can be a doctor, who can perform what procedures, what drugs are legal, who can manufacture what drugs, what claims can be made about a drug or procedure, what insurance can be purchased, who you can purchase it from, what MUST be covered in EVERY policy, what vaccines you MUST get, what procedures MUST be followed to be allowed to put a product on the market, etc. (the list could go on and on). When you disrupt the basic free market process that puts the consumer in direct association with the producer and the producer in direct association with the FREEDOM to do the job they best know how to do, prices are going to get screwed up, shortages are going to occur (or be purposely created), people are going to die, and countless other effects. Every discussion I hear/read about the medical system completely fails to elucidate just how MUCH GOVERNMENT is involved in medicine. 50% of EVERY DOLLAR passes through the hands of the government, and the government controls EVERY aspect of medicine with regulations, controls, laws, restrictions, etc. NONE of those barriers is about making things BETTER for the patient/consumer. GET GOVERNMENT COMPLETELY OUT OF MEDICINE. They have been conspiring and colluding with the AMA, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, and god knows how many other industries for well over 100 years – ALL TO CREATE A CONTROLLED, PROTECTED, CARTEL that benefits the PLAYERS, NOT THE PATIENT. The solution is simple – NO GOVERNMENT IN MEDICINE WHATSOEVER!!! Easier said than done, but nearly nobody is saying it.
I agree it appears we’ve reached the end game. This can has been kicked down the road as far as possible, beginning with medicaid and medicare in the 1960’s, where the real cost of health care was hidden in the deficit. Now we have a $20T of debt to show for it.
Most people would agree health care should be rationed based on the ability to pay, whether through insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays, or out of pocket. The US Congress doesn’t pay for their own health care, arguably the best care available to anyone at any cost, except possibly the ultra rich with private doctors. And they get that health care for life. Why should they be concerned about anyone else?
The lack of political will can be addressed in 2018. I’d like to see these golden parachutes our elected rulers have voted for themselves clawed back. It’s not like it’s an earned reward, more like the spoils of war.
Peace.