The American psyche must gain enough strength to create significant shift in paradigm toward genuine concern for everyone’s welfare. This means that we must (as a nation) desire all citizens’ health. This translates to: opportunity for medical help granted everyone when needed without financial, actuarial, legal, and especially political; obstructions, allowed to impede access to care.
The very title of this topic defines the problem. It assumes that insurance is the means of being healthy and is the vehicle in which health is promulgated.
This is an heroic and mistaken assumption. Insurance, by the very nature of the business, is risk-based. Policyholders pay premiums based on an arbitrary level of risk they pose to insurers of the possibility that cost of care will exceed benefits of premiums paid. The premium (risk) is determined by the payer of care; an interested (and therefore biased) party in the equation.
These defined roles create an intrinsically problematic and adversarial, relational conundrum.
Physician A, employed by Insurance A, will move up corporately by denying any service requested. Physician B, employed by hospital (or clinic) A, will prosper by bringing in revenue. The only way to accomplish B’s objective under our current state of affairs is through the current risk/reward system; whose motivation is to maximize profit. This motivation’s ideal being provision of no care at all.
One dare not experience medical need in this chaotic, inefficient, and ineffectual medical environment. Principles of competition simply do not achieve cost-reasonableness goals. It cannot do so because the system is inherently hindered by conflicting objectives; the profiting party of which magnificently and diabolically bets both sides of the match.
An MRI imaging procedure is seventeen hundred dollars instead of a rational price because the oversupply of machines causes each to be used at a rate well below it’s capacity. Why so many MRI machines in your community? Profit motive-driven health care.
This brings us to the solution. Take Lloyd’s of London out of the equation. The fact is, people’s teeth need cleaning. This is a cost. Insurance sees only the actual cost of the cleaning. Their actuarial calculators are not savvy enough to incorporate preventive value of future tooth extraction cost avoidance asset protection into their premium calculation.
This is the reason for Americans’ relatively short life expectancy relative to other “developed” countries. Insurance companies’ ignorant disincentive to preventative medicine.
The major impediment to a healthy and cost effective health care system is political interest. Immediately and permanently forbidding any political person from receiving one dime from insurance contributors is the very best first step to take toward a healthy health care system. A moment’s delay in this action is too long. Promises of health care reform are as empty air and display dichotomous motivation when lip servers receive money from the problem (insurance companies).
There is malevolently maladjusted malaise in a country that jumps to bail C.E.Os’ wealthy, bumbling and whining insurance stockholders; while simultaneously shyly cowering from provision of preventative disease inoculation in its children.