DO NOT READ THIS POST!!!
Instead, read the much better article from the Charlotte Observer: Why the profit-driven market model doesn’t work in health care. I wish I had written it. Concise and dead-on, it explains why, despite our physician's excellence in treating us, we sometimes feel a bad after-taste connected to the experience. Not that health care providers don't deserve to be paid: they do deserve to be paid, and well-paid, too! It's just that, as the author points out, the delivery of health care is treated as if it were a commodity. And, I would add, by extension we ourselves are turned into commodities as well: A price is set on us. Our contact with the doctor is often limited to 15 minutes; apparently the profit they realize for our visit makes us not "worth" more than that.A year or so ago, my wife complained of back pain, and was prescribed a brace to help her. Now, every single day we receive at least two robo-calls offering to help alleviate back pain. As I am writing this, we just got another! My wife's name, history, and phone number have been sold. We feel as if we ourselves have been sold.
We are like dairy cattle for the health insurers to "milk" for their profit. As soon as we get sick -- or are likely to get sick, they lose interest in us, fast!
The Pharmaceutical Industry is a good example of what happens when the means of healthcare delivery is owned by public corporations, the shares of which must return a profit competitive with other public corporations. To do that, the price of the product must be raised to the point where some people find themselves too poor to live. The investors are so removed from that reality that they scarcely know about it, let alone care.
I remember a scene in the Godfather where someone, before being executed for betrayal, tells his executioners that his defection from the Godfather was "just business."
"Just business" -- will this be the depth to which healthcare will devolve? Not if Jessica Schorr Saxe has anything to say about it. She is the Charlotte family physician and Chair of Healthcare Justice, in North Carolina. She wrote the piece I'm encouraging you to read. She can be reached at HCJusticeNC@gmail.com. I love the piece she's written, and intend to tell her so as soon as I finish this. I hope you will, too.
Dio
PS: If you'd like to leave a comment, (and I encourage you to do so), just click on the number of comments area, and a you'll see a "comment box" in which you can share your thoughts. Don't be afraid to teach me something. I'm learning all the time from your comments, and I love it!
Report Finds: Number of Uninsured Children Climbs, Reversing More Than a Decade of Progress,
ReplyDeleteExcerpted summary:
The number of children in the United States without health insurance increased last year for the first time in more than a decade, according to a new report that highlights potentially worrisome backsliding in pediatric care. The erosion in health insurance came despite a robust economy, which in the past has helped fuel expansions in coverage. (Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times)
In 2016, just 4.7% of children 18 and younger lacked health insurance, according to the census data. That was down from 9.7% in 2008.
In 2017, however, progress reversed, as the uninsured rate among children ticked up from 4.7% to 5%.
That translates to about 270,000 more children without health coverage, according to the new report, which is based on an analysis of census data.
Among those trends was the concerted effort in 2017 by President Trump and congressional Republicans to roll back the 2010 healthcare law, often called Obamacare, and cut hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid for Medicaid and CHIP.
Compounding that problem, Congress for months delayed legislation to reauthorize CHIP funding for states. That prompted state health officials across the country to warn parents that their children might lose coverage.
Created in 1997, CHIP is a government health insurance plan for children of working families who earn too much to qualify for fully subsidized Medicaid coverage but cannot afford most commercial health plans.
In addition to targeting Medicaid and CHIP, the Trump administration has dramatically scaled back marketing and assistance to inform Americans about health coverage on marketplaces created by the healthcare law and to help them sign up.
Administration officials have also issued warnings that immigrant parents who enroll their children in government health plans such as Medicaid risk losing the ability to get green cards, even if the children are U.S. citizens.
READ MORE https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-uninsured-children-20181129-story.html
READ MORE https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-uninsured-children-20181129-story.html