This is garbage that smells worse the longer it lays there. The more people know about it the less they like it and the more that it is going to cost. Look at it like oil prices. The more the demand for oil, the higher the price. Once the price gets high enough, the demand slows and the prices stabilize. The problem with this model is that the money that supports the demand is coming from the government and the government does not want to cut it, because they would be cutting the free loaders who vote them into office. It is like the teacher's unions. They are getting the money directly or indirectly from the government too. Notice when things are paid by individuals with their own money, economic systems work, but when it is the government, all we have is a bunch of people "gaming" the system. Unions are the best at gaming the system when it is the government. Notice that union membership has gone down in private companies while it has increased in the government.
With all this, there has to be a solution. Well what is it? First, we need to come to a balance between supply and demand. The demand is coming from government money so the solution is to reduce the demand and that means reducing the amount of government money and let individuals spend their money or a voucher. This will mean that people who drop out of school or take drugs or allow themselves to get infected with AIDS, they might not have enough resources to pay for state of the art care. If that is the case, I'm sorry. Why should some person who is a total loser be allowed to take tax money out of the pot when they did not put anything in? It comes back to responsibility and incentives. As I have Blogged before, we need incentives for positive behavior and we don't. Why is that? In the caveman days, if some one did not want to hunt or bring back wood for the fire, they were eaten. Now that was a positive incentive and it seems to have worked because the caveman survived and we are here today.
Would you be in favor of some kind of life time limit on medical service paid by the government based on a formula of what you have paid in taxes. If you paid no federal income tax, you might be eligible for some minimum amount and when that was gone, you would be on your own. If you paid in a large amount, then you should be qualified for more. Does that seem fair? It does to me. I had an aunt who never paid any federal income tax, yet she got open heart surgery at great expense to tax payers when she was over 80 years old. She died a few years later and did not know her own name. For those few years of being a vegetable, we paid more for each year than her and her husband made in their total live time. The surgery did not save her life, it might have extended it. Let's say that she could have lived 2 more years without the surgery and 4 years with the surgery. She lived 4 more years, but the surgery can only take credit for the last two years and those were the worst and the most expensive. What is the logic in this? My father refused to go to the hospital when he had lung cancer due to a life time of smoking. He prefer ed to stay at home and smoke until he finally died. I don't think he would have live a month longer if he had been in the hospital and I know he was a lot happier staying at home and smoking. My grandfather died during surgery at age 85. My grandfather did not what any surgery. All he wanted was to go home and die in his won bed. My uncle was able to get my grandfather declared incompetent so that he could over rule my grandfather's wish and to go home without the surgery. Aside from the crazy decision by my uncle, it cost the tax payers a ton of money and had zero value. This is the kind of waste that I am aware of personally and I know that there must be much more.
I think you can see the problem and how we can reduce medical cost. Some people will not get the space age medical services that they do now and I am sorry about that. I would rather have the money to start a new business rather than spend it down a rat hole like the examples sited above. What we have with Obama Care is more money being pushed into an already over heated medical business. I am not going to go into insurance companies because they are not the problem. From my experience talking to average people, I don't think that 5% have any idea how insurance works. All I can say is that it seems that it will get a lot worse before we have the will to do anything about the trend. How bad, I don't know, but it will be bad.
