Ironically, I think this is as much a legal issue as it is a medical one.
If you ask the simple question "why is private healthcare so expensive in this Country?" I think there are two main reasons. The first is because of the massive amount of malpractice insurance that Doctors have to pay to cover themselves against nonsense lawsuits. If you have to earn $150,000 a year just to pay your malpractice insurance, then it's little wonder we are where we are.
The second is that insurance by definition is supposed to cover a person against unforseen events that may occur unexpectedly in their life. But that's not how people have been sold on it or how they use it. People see insurance as a payment plan to cover events that are forseen.
If a couple is going to have a baby for example, they will take out medical insurance....not so much in case of a problem during delivery, but to help them pay for all of the hospital visits, tests etc that happen during the 9 months prior to the birth. These are not unforseen events. These events are part of having a baby and should not be covered by insurance. If you can't afford them then don't have one.
If we used insurance the way it was designed to be used, and if we protected Doctors against nonsense lawsuits by setting a cap in most non life threatening or life altering cases, guess what would happen to the cost of your insurance folks? It would drop faster that Dolly Parton's boobs.
|