Rain Dance

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Think of the ObamaCare reform debate now playing in the US Senate as the final gurglings of polity that knows it is whirling around the drain. They’re pretending to attempt to fix a racket that comprises one-eighth of the American economy. Yikes! How did that happen? At the beginning of the 20th century it was one-quarter of one percent (.25 percent) of the economy.

http://kunstler.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Healthcare-JPG.jpg

The standard explanation is that, first, Medicare jacked up overall healthcare activity in the 1960s, hauling in a customer-base of old folks who previously received no special treatment and were, generally, less well than non-old folk. Secondarily, technological innovation opened up so many new methods of disease control for everybody, young and old, that we’re able to treat more sickness in more complicated ways — and that drove costs up way further.


The greater part of the story remains neatly concealed within the matrix of rackets erected around the money-flows since the big cost bump-up in the 1960s, and these involve insurance companies, Big Pharma, corporatized doctors’ practices, hospital monopolies, and, of course, politicians on-the-take dividing amongst each other a colossal pool of grift that exists mainly for one simple reason: the cost of everything is hidden from public view.

Nobody has any idea what anything costs. Certainly not the patients, sometimes called “customers” or “consumers” — but really hostages. If you go into the hospital for a stent in the left descending coronary artery, nobody will tell you what it costs, starting with the doctors who have performed the procedure a thousand times. They can’t even estimate the cost (or won’t), though they could probably give you a pretty good ballpark number for the cost-and-installation of a new fuel pump on their BMW-28i.

Charges for medical care are never discussed with the patient. Doctors especially pretend to regard such a proposition as beneath the dignity of their profession, rather like British aristocrats regarded all questions pertaining to money in the Downton Abby scheme of things — a filthy business better left to the servants, like disposing of the table-scraps. Of course the “servants” in the hospital scheme of things are a fantastic hierarchy of dangerously overfed clerks overwhelmed by the anomie of spending countless hours typing fictitious numbers into their work stations. A more pointless life can hardly be conceived. If you ask the ones who “interface” with you at the check-out counter how your bill was toted up exactly, you will receive nothing more than a pitiless stare of contempt — which is actually aimed inward at their own existential quandaries, a pathological dynamic that perhaps deserves attention from the research funding troughs.

The cost of everything medical is worked out in a private rain-dance between the aforementioned manifold concerned parties on the basis of what they think they can get away with in any particular case. In hospitals, this is enabled by the notorious ChargeMaster system which, to put it as simply as possible, allows hospitals to just make shit up.

Any bill in congress that affects to reform the gross financial malfeasance in healthcare ought to start with the absolute requirement to publicly post the cost of everything that doctors and hospitals do, and require the “service providers” to pay only those publicly posted costs — obviating the lucrative rain-dance for dividing up the ransoms paid by hostage-patients who come to the “providers,” after all, in extremis. Notice that this crucial feature of the crisis is missing not only from the political debate but also from the supposedly public-interest-minded pages of The New York Times and other organs of the news media. Perhaps this facet of the problem never entered the editors’ minds — in which case you really have to ask: how dumb are they?

(The funniest claim about ObamaCare in today’s New York Times is the statement that 20 million citizens got access to health care under the so-called Affordable Care Act. Really? You mean they got health insurance policies with $8000-deductables, when they don’t even have $500 in savings to pay for car repairs? What planet do The New York Times editorial writers live on?)

The corollary questions about deconstructing the insurance armature of the health care racket, and assigning its “duties” to a “single-payer” government agency is, of course, a higher level of debate. I’m not saying it would work, even if it was modeled on one of the systems currently working elsewhere, say in France. But Americans have acquired an allergy to even thinking about that, or at least they’ve been conditioned to imagine they’re allergic by self-interested politicians. So, the current product of debate in the US Senate is just a scheme for pretending to reapportion the colossal flow of grift among the grifters.

Spare yourself the angst of even worrying about the outcome of the current healthcare debate. It’s not going to get “fixed.” The medical system as we know it is going to blow up, and soon, just like the pension systems across the country, and the treasuries of the fifty states themselves, and the rest of the Potemkin US economy.

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Anonymous
Anonymous

“They’re pretending to attempt to fix a racket that comprises one-eighth of the American economy. Yikes! How did that happen? At the beginning of the 20th century it was one-quarter of one percent (.25 percent) of the economy.”

At the beginning of the 20th century the average lifespan was 46.3 years for en and 48.3 for women. Bye the end of the century it was 73.8 for men and 79.5 for women.

Modern antibiotics (i.e. Penicillin) were not developed until 1928 which added 10 or more years to the turn of the century lifespan by the 1930’s.

That and all the later almost miraculous medical advances since could account for at least a good part of it’s increasing part of the American economy.

Dan
Dan

This is an excellent point. Looking at the graph, I would imagine if we plotted the number of new medical advances over time– and the number of laws/regulations in the medicine — these lines would roughly mirror to the slope of the line given. So while the author makes some good points about why costs are out of control, we also need to realize that we can do so many amazing things, but they come at great cost. So, unless we ration care, and/or limit end of life treatments (neither of which I want to contemplate!), the costs will continue to rise as medical technology advances.

George True
George True

Sorry sir, the idea that medical costs are so high because medicine can now do so much more simply does not hold water. In a free market in health care costs would still come down, probably by at least 80 percent.

A good example of this is lasic eye surgery. When it became available some 20 or so years ago, the cost was thousands of dollars per eye. Today the cost is three or four hundred per eye. How can this be? Simple – since.it is an elective procedure, it has never been covered by insurance. Thus over time, with practitioners competing for customers, the free market established the cost at what it is today.

The same will occur in all facets of medicine once price discovery is allowed, along with government vigorously enforcing anti-trust laws that have been in place for almost a hundred years, and which are enforced for all other industries.

i forget
i forget

Yes about prices dropping in a competitive free market. No about anti-trust laws. Those were conceived by uncompetitive inferiors, to take via color of law force, what they could not freely create themselves. Opening Pandora’s crayola box is always a trespass, always a blowback laden act of conquest. Cold war, hot war, it’s all war, all the time.

Gay Veteran
Gay Veteran

bilge

i forget
i forget

Bridge (over troubled bilges):

In “Antitrust Myths” DiLorenzo refutes “the story of how capitalism supposedly became monopolistic in the late nineteenth century, and how it was brought under control by antitrust regulation” (p. 135). Indeed, he considers “the whole story of antitrust” to be a myth (p. 136). Rather than being monopolies that restricted output to drive up prices, the late-nineteenth-century trusts “were expanding production and dropping prices” (p. 140). The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) was in reality “designed to protect incompetent businesses from superior competition, not to protect consumers from monopoly” (p. 141). Why then did many businesses support the Sherman Act? The same reason that many corporations today support interventionist and anticapitalist policies: They wanted to use the power of government to hurt their competitors. Most of the major antitrust cases are revisited here: American Tobacco Company, Alcoa, the Ready-to-Eat Cereals Case, Brown Shoe Company, IBM, Schwinn, RCA, Pan Am, and, of course, Microsoft. DiLorenzo concludes that the entire antitrust system has served to lessen business competition and the efficiency and productivity of the free market (pp. 146—47).

How Capitalism Saved America

Rothbard, Mises, Monopoly Theory, Socialism and the One Big Firm

Plenty more detailed revisions of the “history” you’re taking for granted on LRC, Mises. Or you can keep swimming in the bilge.

Bottom line, always, is that gov, & it’s magic legal words, is about throttling competition. Absent those legal throttles, would-be monopolies & cartels are besieged on all sides by competitors coming at them for some of the momentarily too fat margins. It’s a kind of arbitrage that takes prices in the mean reversion direction. Keeps it real, on track, progressing – as opposed “progressive”. Without that “illegal” competition, fake prices, fake products\services (such as “healthcare”) is what you get. And there’s your bilge, again.

Mike_SMO
Mike_SMO

A “free market” only gets you so much. Cataract surgery used to take hours, now a specialist is in and out in no time due to ultrasonic lense disruption and soft (foldable) lenses. Technicians and lesser mortals clean up, monitor healing, etc. “Mass production” rather than a “free market” drives the costs in that case. Lasic has been “automated” to a great extent using computer driven tools. The need for a skilled (and expensive) human is greatly reduced. Plastic surgery, vascular surgery, neuro, etc. are still pretty pricey since those are still “in the hands” and “in the eye”. Price competition there will get you the uglies.

Advances in technique and technology is where most “savings” come in.

Now, about those $10.00 Tylenol tablets….

i forget
i forget

Mass production minus free market doesn’t know which mass, nor how much production. That approach is cataract blind. Bring on the malinvestments. The waste. The frigid status quo tundra. Competition drives advances in technique & technology. The cutting bleeding edges start out priced accordingly high. Then prices descend. Over & over this has occurred.

But you are right. “Free markets,” as opposed free markets, slows the process way down, & is the reason for “only so far.”

Dan
Dan

Totally agree about lasic…. but here’s the catch: it’s only coming down in price bc of free market and the fact that it’s such a common procedure. All of the new, cutting-edge techniques are extremely expensive, as are the litany of end of life care that families demand. These are a big part of the increase. Get the govt out of health care would help immensely, but it will still go up as we find more innovative ways to save lives.

Gay Veteran
Gay Veteran

“…the costs will continue to rise as medical technology advances.”

really? paying more for a more advanced TV? nope

high medical costs are a result of monopoly

Aj
Aj

When is anyone who writes one of these articles ever going to admit that changing the law to allow healthcare to become a for-profit enterprise is what also greased the wheels to push up prices? And it happened shortly after Medicare and Medicaid came about, so voila! every bit of the increase is blamed on government programs, and none on the new profits. There was not a for-profit hospital in the USA until the late 1960s, it was illegal, and this change happened specifically to take advantage of the government ‘largesse’.

Anonymous
Anonymous

According to the American Hospital Association only about 18 percent of U.S. hospitals are private, for-profit hospitals. The rest are all non-profit hospitals. How exactly are 18 percent of the hospitals responsible for the increased costs?

i forget
i forget

Profit is good. Necessary. If a business doesn’t have to profit, yet remains in business, it’s not a business. It’s a subsidized thing. It’s a rent extractor•collector. And its marks are not customers. They are prey. They are slaves. Or, in this particular slice of the pied piper pie, they are “patients.”

Gay Veteran
Gay Veteran

“…That and all the later almost miraculous medical advances since could account for at least a good part of it’s increasing part of the American economy.”

pure BULLSHIT, Karl Denninger has proven that you can decrease medical costs by up to 80%. A surgery center in OK does NOT accept insurance, cash only.

How would you do that nationwide? Enforce the anti-trust laws and consumer protection laws.

Dutchman
Dutchman

Several years ago I need a semi-major, out patient surgery. We have ‘good’ insurance, but my wife wanted to know what it cost (women! – but that’s another story). So she calls BCBS and ask them. They tell her she must know the hospital, doctor, exact name of the procedure, and a couple of other things. They tell her it will be about two weeks to get the cost.

Mean while, I had the surgery. About 2 weeks later they called, and had even some more questions. My wife never got the price.

It’s a racket, and it’s going to blow-up.

Rdawg
Rdawg

I know right? My kid needed an x-ray of his hand, so I took him to the hospital. I was informed that my insurance did not cover the x-ray (to check for normal growth, not fracture). The lady then asked me if I wanted to go ahead with the x-ray. I said: “Well, that depends on how much it will cost me”.
She just sort of looked at me bewildered, and said she didn’t know the cost. I asked her if she couldn’t just look it up somehow. It took her 20 minutes of phone calls to give me an “estimate”.

Meanwhile, call your local vet and ask what an x-ray costs; they’ll tell you in about 20 seconds.

A. R. (Rich) Wasem
A. R. (Rich) Wasem

Go to the vet for the x-ray

Rdawg
Rdawg

I wish.

Same day/walk-in appointments, affordable, get your scripts filled on the spot, cash on the barrel-head.

BB

He is right about hidden costs.Even after you pay the hospital off you’re going to get hundred different bills from any number of companies that want money.It is frustrating.
I finally got my date ( July21) for my second operation regarding my first Hernia surgery that failed. I’m glad to be getting a second chance to fix this damn thing but I dread all the bills.

Rdawg
Rdawg

You might be able to get a few bucks from an animal testing lab for little BB.

BL
BL

Ratdawg- That was cold even for you.

Rdawg
Rdawg

Thank you for noticing.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

You could never exceed BB’s insensitive remarks to others. Although, T4C has you beat with her pic of BB driving into a river, him and little bb were swimming to safety.

Rdawg
Rdawg

I’m truly sorry I missed that one.

BL
BL

he and little bb.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

poetic license, ese.

Llpoh
Llpoh

Or see what the going rate for cat is in China town.

Llpoh
Llpoh

Amazed that any hospital would take you, BB, given you bailed on your last hospital bills. I guess a sucker is born every minute.

Why would you worry about the bills? You ain’t gonna pay them.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Why should he, they fucked up the last surgery. Now they want to charge him again? Now THAT’S a racket!!!

MMinLamesa
MMinLamesa

I needed a hernia repaired about 10 years ago. I shopped several surgeons’ hospitals and prices telling them it was cash up front. I got the run around from 1 and prices from 2. I made my decision. I paid the out patient clinic before the surgery and the doctor too.

That was that.

Same for my colonoscopy. In fact, I have never in my life, even when I had health insurance(a catastrophic policy anyway) had insurance pay 1 red cent for any procedure, blood test or medicine.

My advice, don’t get sick and die as young as possible as old as you can. If you are unfortunate and have to put yourself in the medical pipeline, God be with you. My lovely daughter, 37 years old, checked into the hospital this Jan for some swelling and fever after taking up running again after a 2 year hiatus to have my only grand daughter. You’d think NBD. 1 1/2 days later, she had kidney failure and then cardiac arrest. She died.

Thankfully I’m at the age where I know I’m won’t have extraordinary procedures to keep me above ground. It can be a shitty deal but many medical problems are lifestyle choices and WhyTF am I on the hook for that?

I eat very clean, exercise pretty much daily(rigorous) and have a positive out look. But when it’s time, there’s no getting around that. I have visited too many older friends that were warehoused and medicated. Passing through hallways with zombied out people sitting in their wheel chairs, waiting. Not for me man.

Anonymous
Anonymous

So what is more important to human beings other than their health? So if one eighth of your total life’s production is gone into making sure your body works as optimally as possible, what is more important?
Another factor is the lifestyle of typical Americans. Much of healthcare spending is involved in saving them from themselves. Smoking, obesity, inactivity, drug use, promiscuity with unwanted pregnancy and or STDs, depression, anxiety, the list goes on. These behaviors were present 100 years ago, but not to nearly the degree they are present today.

Anonymous
Anonymous

So, you support the collusion then?

Maybe the solution is to not cover self inflicted health problems.

Does a life insurance policy cover suicide?

Jimmy
Jimmy

Life insurance should cover suicide; health insurance should cover self inflicted diseases, such as drug abuse.

The key is personal responsibility. Everybody pays for his or her own insurance. And the insurance industry is transparent and free market oriented. This would be true liberty.

Llpoh
Llpoh

Sixty per cent of all med expenses occurs in the last six months of life.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

LLPOH, sad news. Yohimbo is leaving us. Oh sure, he made the obligatory “I’ll never forget to come back” bullshit, still, he’s said his goodbyes. So sad.

The list of ex-TBPers grows: Stucky, Smokey, AWD, Yohimbo, Punk, Maddie’s, SAH, Colma,
Then there are those hanging off a cliff by the limb of a creosote bush: SSS, T4C, Maggie, flash,

AmazingAz

I no longer consider the US to have health care. Oh sure, they have so called insurance, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay thousands every year, and then go bankrupt anyway if something “catastrophic” happens. Years ago, one could easily see that the future was lost here.

After 2008, I checked out other options. While I love it in northwest Arizona (except when it’s 115 degrees,) and would be happy to retire in the US, it’s sadly no longer economically feasible (unless I work ’til I drop.) Peru has become my choice, and if I can last two more years, I’m there.

I wrote this article in 2010 after receiving therapy for a herniated disc. The MRI was $238! The difference in the quality of care is amazing. We’ve been commoditized; we are no longer patients, but rather hapless victims. Here’s the article:

http://alittlefurthersouth.com/three-reasons-why-i-love-peruvian-healthcare/

As Karl Denninger says, until we start to enforce anti trust & fraud laws against the medical industry, there is zero hope of reform. Lock these bastards up!

rhs jr
rhs jr

A patient gets billed according to their direct costs plus the padded costs of about five other patients the hospital had to treat for free. Until that is fixed, either you and your insurance pay 5X your actual costs or the hospital goes out of business. As long as half or more of the voters are Democrats, this will get worse until the USA collapses like Cuba, Zimbabwe, the USSR, Greece, Venezuela etc.

General
General

Actually the cost of healthcare is much higher then it needs to be for several reasons. Granted that part of the cost is new technology and taking care of patients that can’t afford it, but that isn’t the main driver. The problem is the amount of waste and skimming in the system.

Just using an Epipen as an example. It probably costs about 20 bucks to manufacture the pen, but it sold for 100 each in 2005. The prices kept getting raised until it was 600 each. That is just one out of a thousand examples.

Rdawg
Rdawg

Not even $20 to manufacture; you used to be able to buy them for that much.

If you have got a decent doctor, you can get a script for a vial of epinephrine and syringes. Costs a few bucks if you have a bee allergy or whatever.

Gay Veteran
Gay Veteran

got an even better example: Viagra costs have sky rocketed to $30 a pill (after a discount).
you can buy the same pill in Canada for $1

Dave
Dave

You can get some idea of actual costs by reading a benefits explanation statement. In a recent study by the Cleveland Clinic, it was reported that on average, Medicaid pays $0.18 cents per dollar billed. Medicare pays $0.23 cents per dollar billed and private insurance pays $0.38 cents per dollar billed. If they are willing to accept that, then why should you have to pay more? And you could negotiate to pay less. I asked my doctor what his charge was for an office visit/physical. $230. But when Medicare and my supplemental actually paid him, (no co-pay, no balance billing)he accepted $104.

unit472
unit472

I look at the healthcare industry as just part of the same financial system that gave us securitized mortgages. The insurance industry gets the AAA medical bills that require a total default by the patient. The hospital gets the mezzanine tranch and the patient is the subprime tranch.

The insurance company and hospital negotiate how much they are going to charge an pay and then bill the patient for the remainder.

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Greetings,

Now, I can’t help but notice that when I want to get on a bus with wings that the government agents involved love xray technology so much that they will not only scan 100% of my body but each and every item I bring to the airport and do so for free.

Now, when I really messed up my hand, getting an xray was damn near impossible and I had to wait months before I could have my turn on the MRI machine.

Funny how that works.

Rdawg
Rdawg

To be a little bit fair, I think you’re paying for a radiologist’s interpretation more than anything else.

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Not true. First, the radiologist was in India (I asked) and second, am I not “paying” for the expert opinion of all those TSA agents operating the scanning devices?

Rdawg
Rdawg

I did not mean to suggest that the entire, outrageous cost of an x-ray is the radiologist; just that it is the expensive bit. And surely you are not comparing the chimpanzees working the airport scanners to a trained physician?

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Greetings,

As I said, the hospital outsourced the reading of the MRI to someone in India. They didn’t do so to be nice but to maximize profits. Who or what that read my image was selected because they were the cheapest alternative that maximized the hospital’s profits. If it were somehow possible for the hospital to have minimum wage TSA agents read it then I’m sure that would have happened.

I have no faith that the person halfway ’round the world was in any way competent. How would I even hold that person accountable for a costly mistake?

Anonymous
Anonymous

That is a good ass question.

TampaRed
TampaRed

Rdawg
“And surely you are not comparing the chimpanzees working the airport scanners to a trained physician?”

I would think reading an xray and noticing abnormalities would come w/experience.
I sure hope the guys at the airport are good .If the radiologist misses a tumor,only Nickel dies.
If the chimp at the airport misses a bomb,hundreds will die.

btw,it’s been good knowing you nickel-we’ll miss your posts but some border jumper needs your house there in california–

Rdawg
Rdawg

In 2015, TSA agents missed 95% of threats in breach tests.

Ninety. Five. Percent.

BL
BL

There was a headline on drudge today: ” RAND PAUL: INSURANCE SHOULD BE AVAILABLE FOR $1 A DAY”. Can you imagine what you get for that premium? A picture of an aspirin and a card that says “Good Luck, Hope You Live”.

Truthfully, we should not be paying over $150 for a family, $80 per month for an individual if costs were controlled.

Norman Franklin

Rand Paul is right. I will gladly pay even 50-100$ a month for a catastrophic policy that kicks in and covers everything after I pay the first 5 grand. That would be fair as I am in good shape, don’t take drugs, eat healthy, and drink rarely. What I won’t do, even at gunpoint is spend tens of thousands of dollars to subsidize all the fucked up shit that goes on with gibmedats, Illegals, and old people who make seriously unhealthy choices. Go ahead and bring it, Either the health ‘system’ will collapse of it’s own terminal bloat and corruption or they can repeal obungholes legacy, makes no difference. As the smart people keep reminding us all the time math is hard.

A. R. (Rich) Wasem
A. R. (Rich) Wasem

If any readers or family have any reasonably easily correctible medical conditions (esp. if surgery, including dental, is involved) take care of it/them sooner rather than later – later it may not be possible as JHK opines.

BUCKHED
BUCKHED

I had a doctor give me a price for a procedure recently . He said it was $1273.08 . I said wow doc you have it to the money . He said yep…that’s my boat payment .

Arnold Ziffel
Arnold Ziffel

It would be interesting to overlay in the graph of the health care percentage of GDP the average life expectancy. At some point in that graph the average life expectancy would flat line while costs continue to soar.

TampaRed
TampaRed

Arnold,
Average life expectancy is starting to go down a bit for some groups but it is due to drugs and alcohol.

Suzanna
Suzanna

I would say obesity and diabetes are in the
race for the top.

i forget
i forget

The other piece today, about gross pay to uber drivers, etc, applies to gross domestic product, too. Cartel theft (redundant) amounts needs be netted out to account accurately. Parasites siphon the real economy, they don’t add to it. Bastiat’s busted windows are subtractive, not additive.

James the Wanderer

” I’m not saying it would work, even if it was modeled on one of the systems currently working elsewhere, say in France.”
Is there a France on another planet somewhere that has a balanced budget? It might “work” in the sense that no one CURRENTLY is being turned away – or is patient care being rationed somehow in France? How long before the French economy collapses from all the social costs of socialism?
I think Denninger slipped a gear here – just because the entire French economy hasn’t already collapsed from the costs of single-payer healthcare, it doesn’t mean it WON’T. Although to be fair, you can buy codeine cough syrup in a French pharmacy without even a prescription, so their system IS ahead of us there.

Vodka
Vodka

JHK wants to abandon the good ship Liberalism now that he can see that it’s sinking. How convenient. This POS advocated for most of the things he now criticizes.

I especially love how he now goes by “Jim” instead of the long-running, and insisted upon, “James Howard Kunstler”. Sort of like a trial lawyer would suddenly want his client, Robert Thurston Winthrop III, to be known as “Bobby” during the trial. Nice move.

So he is shocked at the terrible outcome of the government being involved in healthcare. Here’s a quick lesson for him of government involvement in a few things just in the past 3 decades: government guarantees student loans and tuition skyrockets. Government guarantees home mortgages and the prices skyrocket. Government subsidizes crop prices/crop insurance and land prices skyrocket. Government gets involved in healthcare insurance and………

Rise Up

Check out medical care costs in Cuenca, Ecuador:

“Cuenca’s survey of retirees found that most were either paying for healthcare out-of-pocket or had private healthcare. But some are reliant on Ecuador’s public healthcare system. Foreigners only need to pay into the system for three months before they have access to full benefits.

Because Medicare doesn’t cover most costs abroad, the Herrons, for example, were paying $84 a month to belong to the public healthcare system. When Michael, a 76-year-old retired IT worker-turned-novelist, recently ended up in the emergency room for a cardiac issue, the total bill was $133. In the past, the same procedure in the United States had been billed to his insurance company at $186,000.

Crespo, the city official, said the retirees are pumping money into the economy, but there are growing concerns over how they might be affecting the healthcare system.

“We’ve heard about cases where someone night need brain or heart surgery that might cost $300,000 in the United States and they have the operation here for $300 because they had paid into the system for three months,” she said. “The price differences are abysmal.”

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/world/article154209369.html

So many American “pensionados” are retiring to Ecuador and other Central/South American countries, they are tightening up their immigration policies.

Rise Up

Last year I was fed up with my physician who would not allow an upper body scan or cardiac stress test, so I paid out-of-pocket for a Virtual Physical ($895). I had been on blood pressure medication for a couple of years but still had borderline BP levels. Plus, I was having some chest pain periodically which had me concerned.

The Virtual Physical (CAT Scan) showed that I had a hiatal hernia (stomach was pressing up into my chest cavity)–a relief since it wasn’t a heart condition. Since my high-option PPO plan allowed me to see a specialist without my regular doctor’s referral, I went to Johns Hopkins Cardiac Specialists and had a heart surgeon perform a stress test (which I passed with flying colors) and he doubled my BP meds, saying the strength my regular doctor had prescribed was like “pissing in the ocean”.

Now my BP is under control and it was worth every penny for the peace of mind. When I told my regular physician, she just rolled her eyes without saying a word. She’s since retired and I’m on a different insurance provider plan anyway.

BL
BL

Riser – It’s most likely the daily oogling of those almost naked womenz that makes your BP rise. Moderation in all things, that’s the ticket.

Flying Monkey
Flying Monkey

Am I missing something? I though the health care industry was around 18% or GDP not 8%. If so, we spend less at a % of GPD on health care as does Germany with around 11%.

hardscrabble farmer

My wife and her younger sister are a good control group. Her sister is more of your typical American in that every time she gets a cold or has a spot she hasn’t seen before she heads on over to the doctor or the hospital and winds up with a medical bill of several thousand dollars. They never take a look and say give it a few days, they just start ordering a barrage of tests and scans and pass her around from one medical professional to another for a week or two until the cold clears up or the pimple goes away.

In this way she runs up $20,000 of bills per year on average (she has an insurance policy with a mid-sized company and has deductibles that won’t send them to the poorhouse but rather allows for this kind of behavior). Now multiply by her spouse and children who behave the same way and you have a couple of full time annual salaries for gentle reassurance that they are living beings with occasional concerns about mortality.

Our family hasn’t spent a fraction of that in over decade. My wife is slim, looks fifteen years younger than her actual age (her younger sister could be her mother by appearances) has more energy than any three people put together and when she isn’t feeling well, she rests until she feels better, the cure to about 99% of non-life threatening injuries. We’ve learned to sew stitches in human flesh, set broken bones, treat viruses, and lead the kind of lifestyle that makes most illness and infection virtually non-existent. And we have learned to live with the rest. I don’t know if everyone would be willing to go to that extent, but the savings in anxiety alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands in insurance and co-pays over that time has been very significant. Insurance is a lot like cell phones in that humanity has survived without either for far longer than it has been dependent upon them and the cost over the short time both have been around is astronomical for the benefits received.

In a world of specialists we assume that only a doctor can tell us we have the flu and what to do about it, or that the sore shoulder will get better with some heat packs and a little bit of rest. No one has the capacity to simply be a human being, to feed themselves properly, sleep well, drink plenty of clean water, exercise every day, etc, etc. They need reassurance, whirring machines, huge well lit buildings filled with white coated authorities that will scan their chart for every detail that will prolong their existential crisis and pronounce them cured/healthy/it’s normal.

No one lives forever, maladies and illness come and go, people get hurt and then they get better, but nothing is accomplished by turning your entire life over to the health care industry (they actually call it an industry) as if that were the panacea. This is a form of mental illness that can only be treated by completely rethinking our entire paradigm top to bottom and then radically altering your lifestyle. Or choosing to embrace the crazy.

Collective insanity costs money. Lots and lots of money.

Suzanna
Suzanna

stitches into human flesh?
Okay…I would use steri strips (make your own)
and cover the wound during activity/leave open at
night. Watch carefully. I love that you noted REST
as a “treatment” as it is maybe the best.

i forget
i forget

Doc’s for the body. Docs for the body politic. Doc’s for everything. Credentials are epaulets in hierarchical command chains. The ranks issue orders to below, follow orders from above, & pride of place is maintained by prides of prey-prepping predators. It is symbiotic, everywhere in nature, wo\man no exception. In the main.

I think what matters most is that my money, & your money, & her money, matters most to whoever its being *freely* traded to. Competition is key, while cartels, whether local, or not, are just rusting locks to which the keys have been officially misplaced.

Saw a specialist after my hospitalization. He wanted to know why I got out of the bed, pulled out the iv’s, left (eventually, after the standoff). :: Impossible to sleep\rest, constant iv alarms, nursegangs at all hours turning on overhead kliegs, talking\laughing, checking off boxes on clipboards, no food for me – I was the food, & definitely not the customer…. He said, yeah, if you’d have gone to Thailand, instead, you’d have had masseuses & menus. He called it the American system. Well, systematizing other people by force is enslavement. “Systems” should move, constantly, as emergent properties of competition. Instead it’s insurgent properties via color of law from insider traders on high. Some of the dumbest, most useless, noncompetitive people I’ve interacted with, in years, were in that hospital. Bureaucrats, with furniture coasters embedded in their feet.

MacGhil
MacGhil

Where was antifa when Barry’s Big Fascist Medical System was passed?

100 Years of US Medical Fascism
https://mises.org/library/100-years-us-medical-fascism

100 Years of Medical Robbery
https://mises.org/library/100-years-medical-robbery

Boat Guy
Boat Guy

Having survived a catastrophic illness that required a kidney transplant and the drug maintenance required afterwards “POW” between the eyes !
My wife and I always saved and paid for the higher end health insurance and it was a good thing we did !
Remember Doctors , Hospitals Drug Companies and Insureance Companies colluded to start this system originally to secure and regulate their income streams so obviously everybody wants a huge slice of the pie but nobody addresses where the pie comes from .
In general Americans that are paying the freight for health care are paying more and more for less and less .
Imagine filling your car up with gas and then discovering the price after you give the cashier your car insurance info !
Fact many medical costs could be streamlined and posted and most drug prices can and should be regulated to prevent gouging , like buying plywood before a hurricane !
To the guy that says pay cash on the barrel head great idea for a bag of flour but one 90 day drug supply went from $1,200 to $3,000 thanks to the Affordable Health Care Act and the deductiable went from $3,000 to $8,000 and I hope you have $300,000 laying around for a major hospital stay , good luck ! Obama’a successful legacy , keep telling yourself that you babbling fool ! Oh and where is my $2,500 bucks savings ?

i forget
i forget

Bye, bye, miss American pie. Cartelism is just conservatism locked & loaded via color of law (& when that fails to collect the rents, the other lock\load is brought to bear). And conservative cartelism doesn’t expand the pie. Or make more pies. It says the pie is finite, then uses “the law” to make it so. Then it says this is our pie. Tho actually, pie enslavement was all conservative cartelistas ever had on their minds. Countries are cartels. And people, the captive populations within countries, are the pie. Cannibalism, cartelism, conservatism, countryism, cronyism…whole lotta’ synonism. & that ain’t cynicism. That’s just piebald truth. 9 & a fraction out of 10 prefer pied pipers – whose specialties are rats, & children.

As I listen, then, I can hear in that one voice the simultaneous presence of all the levels of man’s history, as of all the stages of life before man. Every step in the game becomes as clear as the rings in a severed tree. But this is an ascending hierarchy of maneuvers, of stratagems capping stratagems, all symbolized in the overlays of refinement beneath which the original howl is still sounding. Sometimes the howl shifts from the mating call of the adult animal to the helpless crying of the baby, and I feel all man’s music—its pomp and circumstance, its gaiety, its awe, its confident solemnity—as just so much complication and concealment of baby wailing for mother. And as I want to cry with pity, I know I am sorry for myself. I, as an adult, am also back there alone in the dark, just as the primordial howl is still present beneath the sublime modulations of the chant.
You poor baby! And yet—you selfish little bastard!…. ~ Alan Watts, “The Joyous Cosmology”

“I’d like to find your inner child & kick its little ass” lol…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2-jYsOCn1M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih7N9_VUU4U

Suzanna
Suzanna

Kind of funny that Jim/JHK becomes KD
within one article. Proof of life.

Milw05
Milw05

People have a misunderstanding when it comes to life expectancy. This needs to made more clear. Many children died in the first fews months and years in say 1900, upwards of 50%, this is why the average life expectancy was 47. In reality if you made it through childhood you would live on average around 6 or 7 less years than present. Even during industrial England of 1850 was only 8 years shorter than now and an average person if surviving childhood would live to their late 60’s.

An noble family in Venice, Florance or England during the 15th century lived on average to 70. During the Roman empire the average Roman lived to 47.5 if they survived childhood and the Patrician class would live up to 20 years longer.

We have spent Trillions of dollars of research and Medical care, yet have increased your lives by 8 years or so.

Fulton

Health care consumes 18% of GNP. Defense spending about 4% . It is very simple: the US Healthcare Industry is a criminal activity.

Boat Guy
Boat Guy

Just heard Senator Chuck Shumer lament : the republicans won’t let us help with the changes to the health care bill that democrats fucked up and rammed thru ? Sit back and wait Chuck , I am certain the republicans can continue to fuck over the health care system and the American people just as well as Obama you and Pelosi Galore already have !

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