Health Insurance Illuminated
For most Americans the cost of health care is reflected mainly in the premiums they pay. In addition, their perspective may be that insurance companies are the controlling force affecting the cost of health care. However, health care and its cost is far more complex. On a new blog Health Insurance Illuminated, I try to use my nearly fifty years of experience in designing and managing health benefits to explain health insurance, health benefits, health care and the efforts by corporations and government to control health care costs.
I urge you to visit Health Insurance Illuminated and join the discussion.
Rising healthcare costs… one of my top 5 favorite subjects.
They need to go down, by a lot! A simple way to do that is to make people actually pay for it directly. Image you get a bill for $100,000 from the hospital and you have to pay for it yourself… it is just not going to happen for most people. Hospitals would not get away with charging $100 for an aspirin if people actually had to pay for it them self — it just would not be tolerated. Housewives of American would look at every medical charge and want an explanation.
A person cannot afford a stay in the hospital? Send them to the free clinic down the street. Make people pay the actual cost and demand will drop, when demand drops then so will costs. You will think long and hard about how long you are willing to pay for your 90 year old mother’s stay in the hospital when you have to pay the bill yourself. People should have to make that decision. Cannot pay for it? There is a free hospice down the street.
Personal responsibility seems to have become a thing of the past. People don’t want to pay for their health services, they want a free lunch. Make people pay the actual cost of medical care and watch the prices drop.
If Americans are too unwilling for my idea, I hear that Switzerland has a much more successful health plan than the US one for a much lower cost. The people pay most costs them self, but the government helps out in catastrophic cases
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
Anyway, my solution is a return to personal responsibility and free choice.It would be in the best interest of this country if employers stopped paying for healthcare for their employees. It is the best way to control costs in my opinion. People are not frugal because they don’t have to pay the bill.
Perhaps what we need is a return to the concept of insurance which is a combination of personal responsibility and protection from unplanned, truly unaffordable costs such as we do with auto and homeowner insurance.