[Peace-discuss] why does health care in amerika just plain suck? - Nader

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Well, he didnt exactly ask the question that way but he gave the answer:

FRAUD.

No, not Sigmoid Flexure, the famous idiomatic mind-boggler and cocaine 
sniffer,
but the trio of theft, robbery, plunder.

    Why Are US Health Costs So High? Follow the Bills  - by Ralph Nader
    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/01-4

    ...Health care bills come with hefty levels of fraud. From the
    historic study twenty years ago by the then General Accounting
    Office of the Congress to the present estimates by the nation's
    leading expert in this field, Professor Malcolm Sparrow at Harvard
    University, fully ten percent of all health care expenditures are
    the result of computerized billing fraud and abuse. That will be
    $270 billion this year.

    Dr. Sparrow, an applied mathematician, says it could be higher if
    the federal government would simply do a more detailed study. He
    adds that the enforcement budget should be one percent of the
    estimable volume of fraud. In actual practice, the enforcement
    budget is less than one/tenth of one percent, even though every
    dollar of enforcement brings in at least seventeen dollars back.

    Obviously the corporate fraud lobby is stronger than the
    taxpayer/consumer lobby in Washington, D.C. But why the health
    insurance companies, a formidable force in their own right when it
    comes to protecting its turf against single payer or full Medicare
    insurance do not do more to stop fraudulent billing practices, is a
    puzzle.

    All in all, the health care industry is replete with rackets that
    neither honest practitioners or regulators find worrisome enough to
    effectively challenge. The perverse economic incentives in this
    industry range from third party payments to third party procedures.
    Add paid-off members of Congress who starve enforcement budgets and
    the enormous profits that come from that tired triad "waste, fraud
    and abuse" and you have a massive problem needing a massive solution.

*
Nader wonders why the insurance companies dont seem to care... it's no 
wonder, folks.
Fraudulently inflated billings increase tend to increase insurance 
company profits.
There seems to be no end to the Ponzi game, since more suckers are born 
every minute.

Some may see "Single Payer" as a means of controlling the fraud.

Single Payer is a not much more than a band-aid, a bit of tamed iodine 
sprayed on the surface of a deep festering abscess.

There are many roots to the problem.

One problem is that there are not enough doctors.  The United States 
doesnt make enough
doctors and the supply is artificially controlled to make sure that 
there arent enough.

American doctors are overeducated and overpaid for most of what they do.  We
need more soldier level medical personnel and not so many bosses and 
administrators and
high level specialists.  Specialists are great.  And needed.  But giving 
injections and doing
minor surgery isnt really Rocket Science, folks.  (and minor surgery is 
when they cut on someone else
other than You.)

In many countries of the world the people can go to the pharmacy and buy 
stuff to treat themselves.
Like in China and Vietnam, for instance.  And the medicine costs some 
small fraction of what it does in the USA.

It's amazing that the USA has been such patsies for the charlatans and 
Ponzi artists of the medical industrial complex.
And it's enforced by the police state now.

wj
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