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Friday, September 11, 2009
Summarizing many of my thoughts on health care in the United States
This article by Neil Macdonald from the CBC summarizes many of my thoughts on the subject. Basically, the private health insurance providers do some unconscionably cruel and immoral things in the name of profit, and somehow people are more scared of the government than those corporations.
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Not a day goes by that I don't take a minute to envy Canada. If not for that cold winter weather!!!
And, here is a dousy of a stat from the California nurses association: 21% of all health care claims made to insurance companies over the last 7 years have been denied. Yep, if you made five claims to insurance money, one was getting denied. That is a death panel right there!
Now, the California insurance companies did not dispute the numbers, but defend themselves by saying the number was that high because of an error in paperwork (something did not get filed correctly, etc, leading to so many denied claims). Which I think is just as much evidence that we need a government system here in the States.
And, last year Americans paid 426 billion dollars to private health insurance companies. In return, they paid out 331 billion in medical expenses. The rest (29% or 95 billion dollars) was eaten by administrative costs and profits. By contrast, medicare had an administrative cost of only 3%. It would seem just putting that 426 billion dollars that we already spent to the private insurance industry to a government medicare sytle plan for all would get pay for everyone, just because of the 85-90 billion a year we would save in administration costs!
That is a pretty weak defense by those insurance companies...
I just wonder why these things aren't discussed more when talking about health care, instead of 'death panels' and 'government bureaucrats between you and your doctor'...
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