Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Assessing Obama’s Divergence From McCain, Pt.3 – Greed, the ‘Achilles heel’ of costs.

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This brings us to a third and, perhaps most difficult, hurdle. Good old greed. $1,200 for a tetanus shot…c’mon now! No system could ever sustain itself when all the major players are given a free ticket for unbridled greed. This turns out to be the worst nemesis that Massachusetts, Obama or McCain will face. Originally, before health insurance was so prevalent, ordinary people paid medical bills directly out of their paycheck, and were ok with that. But typical medical costs today can easily amount to several years’ pay. A patient is doomed without health insurance. We’ve already seen how evil it is to run up credit for everyday living expenses. Credit is definitely not the answer to high medical bills, even though it has become the norm. Credit will always be necessary for home mortgages but, the projected outcome needs to be a very high priority for the decisions. With medical bills, the patient has little, if any, say in the matter. Adequate health insurance is essential.

The good creators of the Massachusetts universal health insurance model anticipated that, if they threw much more business to the state-wide health care industries, that the free increase in business would result in lower medical prices. A $20 million CAT Scan machine can bill 20 patients a day, instead of only 2. The investment costs are recaptured ten times as fast. But in Massachusetts, this has not proven to be the case. Even though many medical providers are filling up their coffers at a phenomenal rate from the increased business, their fee rates have not come down. The greed-factor was, apparently overlooked and now the entire universal health insurance model stands in jeopardy.

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