Change is hard.
Seriously, this is all I can see from this. Everyone will tell you verbally that they want change, but it's hard to change people's behavior even if it's good for them. There are lots of obese people that continues to shovel food down their throat even though they know it can kill them, but they can't stop themselves. As a culture, NAmericans tend to have short attention spans and that means their future me usually lose to their current me. In order to lose weight, you need to fight the temptation for that chocolate cake and go work out, so you can have the big pay out in the end, a fit body/looking nice, less health problems, etc. But in a culture with lots of instant gratifications, you want pleasure NOW, and you don't really want to suffer/endure for it. Therefore, your current self loses to your future self, and you ate the chocolate cake instead of going to work out.
Health care reforms don't seem that much different, but there is a growing trend that is fairly interesting that some of you may want to pay attention.
Let me state that, personally, I think health insurance is a bad business to be in despite how much money they seem to make. As a profit generating business, you want lots of healthy people paying premium rates to make money without too much claims. But the young and the healthy usually won't get that much coverage or any coverage at all. The people that usually pay for premium coverage usually knows something might be up and they want to be covered for it, but that means bad business. If the only people paying you premiums are those who might be or already sick and making lots of claims, you'll lose money in the end since you can't find enough healthy people for your cost overall. How do you get out of this? Trim the fat. The cheaper the procedure, the better. And there are the corporate health insurance that some get to enjoy, but that's hedging the bets too. You give them one size fits all health coverage, and hope that there are enough healthy people to pay for any serious claims due to accidents or what not.
So, where might this lead you?
American health care professionals are probably some of the best paid in the world, and that costs A LOT of money. It might not surprise some to hear that there are some health insurance companies offshoring your health care. Off the top of my head, there is a growing business in India, Thailand, and sometimes HK, TW, and China for Americans doing none immediate life threatening procedures. This is win win for the insurance companies, since they can save so much money by offshoring, the plane tickets and hotels stays are chump change. The patients might be happier too. They get to stay in a 4-5 stars hotel and there is no wait time for them. They are private patients that paid top dollars (comparatively to locals) to get treatment, so they get personalized service, 4-5 staffs on call and any concerns they have are immediately addressed. So, isn't this great? I can see it now, the next big thing in the US will be off shore health care (and why not, what isn't offshore these days?), no wait times, no bargaining, no trying to go for a better/more expensive doctor hospital, and you get a free vacation and the insurance companies save money to boot!
So...., what could be the problem then? Nothing really, as long as you don't mind hopping a plane to Thailand, Singapore or whatnot for your surgery, I don't see the issue. But I can guess some of you might be able to imagine the implications of a such future/industry. What would this mean for the American health industry? There would probably be lobbying, crying foul, questioning foreign hospital credentials, and basically some borderline classicist remark that these foreign doctors can't be as good as them, that's why it's so cheap. Doctors are professionals who have protected their livelihood by continuing to raise the barrier of entry to their profession in order to show authority. What they might not know is a lot of these foreign doctors were trained in the US, UK, Japan, Canada and all that to start with, and that's why they can paid top dollars in their home country.
What could all this mean in the end? I am not sure, since I am just pointing out a very probable possibility in the future for Americans. The thing is though, how many Americans can accept offshore health care? If not, then what's the solution? The current system isn't working, and that much is obvious. Americans pay a truckload of money each year on health care and thousands of dollars per patient each year is spent on paying for insurance companies/and hospitals' bureaucracy. Doesn't the Americans deserve better if they are paying that much? Why shouldn't government handle your health care? Isn't that what you pay governments to do? To take care you? As for the possibility of government bureaucrats trying to save money by "killing" the patient..., what do you think private insurance companies are doing now? I thought Americans don't like big business? I would think there would be more oversight for government employees than any private companies are willing to police themselves.
Anyway, my 2 pence, peace and pray you don't get sick.
