The reason why healthcare is so expensive these days is the same reason why house prices far outstripped inflation over the past 30 years.
OPM.
Other people's money.
No one pays for healthcare with cash anymore. They use their insurance companies for everything, even routine checkups and minor complaints. Increased demand with a corresponding increase in supply results in higher prices. It's simple economics. If people had to pay for more of their healthcare needs out of pocket, you can be sure they'd be more prudent in their use of healthcare resources. They wouldn't be fleeing to the doctor for every sneeze, sniffle, ache, and pain.
I remember on my first deployment, a lieutenant colonel came to me asking for some free Claritin. If I remember correctly, we were out at the time. Anyway, I suggested he go to the PX and buy some there. "Buy Claritin? I can't afford to buy Claritin," he responded contemptuously. Now bear in mind, as a LTC, he made over $72,000 in base salary alone -- not including housing allowance, combat pay, and various other pays. I stared back with him with equal contempt. "Sir," I said, "I'm a PFC and I can afford to buy Claritin."
And I kicked him out of my clinic.
"Nonstopdrivel" wrote:
Well said.
And that's why Obamacare or whatever the Washington morons come up with is doomed to fail.
Because its built, as too much of our "social infrastructure," on a foundation of OPM. We'll be lucky if the "cost estimates" turn to be off by
only a factor of two.
The irony, of course, is that the whole health care "reform" is coming about because of the need for "affordable" health care. But you don't make something affordable by making a transfer payment. That just shifts the cost to someone else.
If you want to make health care more affordable, what you do is change the ability to pay. You don't figure out how to use current wealth more wisely, you figure out how to increase wealth. If we want "cheaper" health care, we need higher incomes; and if we want higher incomes, we need to figure out new ways to ensure our economy grows.
Not figure out way after way to make that growth harder.
Frankly, if I were under 40, I'd be contemplating moving not only my financial wealth offshore, but my human capital. I'd be thinking of going expat in a big way. Because when we baby boomer leeches hit our seventies and eighties, there's going to be hell to pay.
One of the great sources of this country's economic strength is its attraction for the hardworking and the bright and the creative. We've never had to worry about a "brain drain," because they all drained into us.
But whether it's health care idiocies, or climate idiocies, or education idiocies, or intellectual property idiocies, or consumer borrowing idiocies, or just our general desire to ensure that someone else pays for whatever we want, we seem to be doing everything we can to push the hardworking and the bright and the creative away.
There may not be a stopper big enough for the holes we're hammering out of the bathtub.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)