BridgeWalker-
I think that's what people are saying.
What we really need is what they once called "Major Medical." This was insurance that was really insurance: you paid a relatively small monthly fee, and if the SHTF in your life, insurance covered the unexpected and beyond-your-control costs.
It didn't pay for standard medical stuff, the few hundred bucks a year or whatever that healthy people spend. But if you really got in medical trouble, you didn't have to worry about the cost.
This was like car insurance. If the car gets stolen, swept away in a flood, or wrecked, it's insured. However, nobody expects car insurance to pay for an oil change, new tires, a new radiator after 10 years, or other reasonable maintenance and repair that every car needs.
Now, we have HMO and HMO-style insurance, where we pay a rather large monthly fee, but expect, in return, to have everything paid for when we go to the doctor. This creates perverse incentives, and perverse realities.
Ever go to a doctor and ask, "Hey, what will this cost?" Try it sometime. The answer you get would probably land your mechanic or plumber in jail, but it's SOP in the "health care" business.
Our current system in the US makes it almost impossible to pay for one's own health care. Furthermore, we had a $64,000 hospital bill a year ago. The insurance company paid about $16,000, and we had to fork over a few thousand here and there. Who paid the other $44,000? Nobody. The insurance company haggles. But if we weren't insured, we'd be on the hook for the whole $64,000. Name any other business that can do this legally, especially when they will not and cannot quote a price before performing expensive services! They charge only after the fact, and seemingly whatever they feel like charging.
We kept getting bills for a few hundred every few months. Name any other business that can send a bill a year later, without even specifying WHAT services were performed, and WHY you owed more money all of a sudden, and threaten to ruin your credit when you dispute the charge! NAME ONE.
Our health care system is so screwed up on the business side, that handing payment over to government right now would be like dumping gasoline on a house fire. No matter what, we have to FIX the system before we worry about who pays for it.
Finally, what we call "health care" isn't really. It's "body repair." "Health care" happens when we eat, exercise, sleep, manage our time, etc., to maximize our health. When something breaks, that's "repair", not "care." The idea that going to the doctor will make one healthy is a myth. It might enable one to become healthier (i.e. a doc who found out my legs were different lengths so that now I can jog and hike without pain), but health care is a personal thing. I can still choose to jog or hike, or not.
