Bureaucracy to Blame for Current Insurance Nightmare --- Remedy? More Government!

It’s no big secret in this country that health insurance costs have skyrocketed in the past four decades. When my mother was my age (25) a healthy young female was insured by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois for $36 a month for health insurance, and $5 a month for life insurance. Fast-forward 25 years, the same coverage costs around $143-$200 (this is only emergency care, so add app. $50 a month for better coverage). Some 40 years ago American medical spending was estimated at 5 percent of national income; today it is calculated at some 16.5 percent and rising continually. Now one could assume that everything adjusts for inflation, however has our healthcare really gotten that much better in the past 25 years? Yes there have been medical advancements, new drugs, new diagnostics, but if they are so astronomical and no one can afford them, are we that much better off than we were in 1984? The problem with our nation’s healthcare is systemic and multi-tiered. We have heard the sundry as far as explanations go as to why healthcare is so expensive. The unprecedented greed in the Pharmaceutical industry is definitely a contributing factor. However knowing several doctors and hearing their complaints about how difficult it is to collect money for Medicare and Medicaid patients, it became obvious to me, that yet again the insurance debacle originated with government interference. From Bloomberg.com: Employers and private health insurers pay a “hidden tax” of $88.8 billion each year because government programs fail to pay enough to doctors and hospitals, an industry-sponsored study found. Inadequate reimbursements by programs such as Medicare and Medicaid increase the annual cost of covering a family of four by $1,788, according to the report, issued today by the actuarial consulting firm Milliman Inc. At hospitals, the payment gap between private and public insurance has more than doubled in 10 years, the Seattle-based firm said. Many doctors literally struggle to make ends meet when they first begin their practice, because the government is so inept at disbursing funds for Medicare and Medicaid. Logically when doctors don’t receive enough money from the patients who cannot pay (patients with government sponsored plans) they then must pass it along to the people who have insurance, thus insurance companies raise their premiums. So what does Obama have planned to rectify the situation? Rather than going in and reforming the programs that caused insurance rates to skyrocket, the O administration has come up with a plan that would literally repeal them. Great right? No, in its place will be a swollen bureaucratic health insurance company that receives large amounts of TAX PAYER money. It would eventually swallow private insurance. Private plans would not be able to compete because the subsidies would significantly undercut them. The government would decide who is deemed worthy of care, and the elderly would be the first expendable sector. We all know the nightmare that lays ahead, Canadian style healthcare run by a corrupt government that has already bankrupted our nation. Here’s to hoping that those blue dogs stick to their guns, and the oligarchy does not pile drive this one through.