What I'm going to write instead is what I think we should do to move forward in the debate and ultimately move forward in our lives. We need, first off, to recognize a difference in vocabulary. There is a massive difference between health care and health insurance. Reform in one is not necessarily reform in the other, and both need help. End-of-life care does not mean unnatural death and does not mean Kevorkian-style assisted suicide, necessarily. While politicians must be the keepers and maintainers of politics, the time for politics is not now.
Health care, doctors taking care of patients, needs reform. Especially in Eastern Kentucky, where doctors develop reputations for prescribing any pills desired by their patients, also known as 'pill farms' give the entire profession a bad name, there must be a measure of control and assessment placed on those who can impact the very core of our lives, our bodies. Health insurance, planning for the unpredictable, needs reform. Especially in a country where 44 million people, or roughly 1 in 8 people, don't have any means of paying for health services.
Now that I have established my opinion that reform is necessary, the question is where should that reform come from? Should it be privately sourced or should our government be asked once again to rescue us from ourselves? Doctors are already required to get licensed by an independent organization and when they 'screw up,' which for doctors usually means end someone else's life, they are investigated by a private organization and can lose their license. Is it possible for these organizations, run by private companies, to run routine examinations of each doctor's skills and an evaluation of their diagnoses and care plans for their patients? Giving doctor's a check-up? Professors in colleges must undergo this sort of maintenance. While it certainly won't prevent all deaths and it certainly won't catch all 'bad doctors,' it is certainly a step in the right direction and it can be done without any government interference.
Health insurance needs to be reformed as well and it is in the particular area that I think that government interference may be necessary. The only reason that I think the government may have to step in in these aspect of health services is that insurance has been broken for a while now and the private system seems either unable or unwilling to fix itself, in either case someone might have to step in. Before there can be reform for insurance there must be reform in what I think is the biggest problem of all: hospitals.
Doctors have to make money, they should, they went to school for a long time and they provide a necessary service. Hospitals, on the other hand, should be entirely non-profit organizations. When hospital administrators are more worried about cost margins than they are the lives of their patients, care is impacted. Another source of frustration, and by frustration I mean destruction of human life, that stems from hospitals is the complete lack of any means of accountability. In a free market, services are provided for a price and then buyers decide if the service is worth the price set. If it is they buy it and if it isn't they go find a similar service somewhere else. This is supply and demand and it's the only way a free market works. I'm going to put this next sentence in capital letters so that everyone gets this. WE DO NOT HAVE A FREE MARKET HEALTHCARE SYSTEM AND THUS WE CAN NOT PROTECT IT. Hostpials need to set prices for procedures based on the price of supplies and labor such that the doctors are paid and the administrators are paid and the hospital staff are paid and the best quality products are purchased while the costs are able to be kept low because there is no eye for profit on the part of the hospital as a whole. That was a long sentence but not a run-on I'm keeping track. That last sentence was a run-on. Tee hee.
If hospitals list their prices then people will be able to decide if they actually want to purchase health insurance or not and they will also be able to see the direct benefits of that insurance. If you don't have car insurance and your brakes go out then you know how much it's going to cost to get your brakes fixed. If your insurance covers brake repairs you are able to see exactly how much money you're saving on that specific repair due to your monthly pay-in to the system and you are able to recognize the benefit: thus you understand the service provided.
If people understand the benefit of the service provided by insurance companies, they are also able to give that benefit a value, and then insurance becomes open to a free market as well. To speak to the issue of socialized medicine, people who mention that mean socialized health insurance, and we've had it for 40 years. The majority of people who are uninsured are not the old, who receive Medicare, or the poor, who receive Medicaid, or teachers or other government employees, who receive government insurance (yes, your Congressman too. Even Republican Congressmen receive public insurance, in case you were wondering), but instead it is the young and employed who are the most uninsured. In essence, me. So this issue doesn't affect the old or the poor or the government-employed, it affects me. When you see tapes of the town hall meetings, who is providing the most vitriol against healthcare reform? The old, the poor, and the government-employed.
So I'm going to end this blog with a familiar phrase: keep your hands off my health-care!
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