Thread: Paying For Health Care

Originally Posted by sycld

There are a many good reasons why American healthcare costs so fucking much. Here are a couple of them:

• ridiculously high markups by insurance providers
• prescription of expensive but unnecessary procedures by physicians
• insane regulations that encourages physicians to become specialists instead of GP (more GPs means more preventative, cheaper care... more specialists means more expensive care after illnesses have progressed)
• the end of home visits by physicians (many patients don't have to be transported by ambulance to an emergency room if doctors would just perform home visits, which are much cheaper on the system)
• an over-reliance on emergency room care due to a lack of access to non-emergency medicine (emergency visits cannot be turned down by hospitals and are very expensive compared to standard care)

There's just so much fucked up about the American system compared to that of other nations.

2, 3 and 5 are byproducts of 1; care givers/insurance companies are largely able to charge/prescribe whatever they want, since someone will cover it. In the past doctors were able to make house calls and keep charges down because patients paid out of pocket, and doctors that charged high fees would lose business to the first guy to undercut them.