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ORIGINAL: DaddySatyr

Greed and lack of adherence to the Hippocratic Oath.

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

You get what you pay for. If you don't like it go to Cuba, like Chaves just did..

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
Tort reform under the current system wont make a difference. Most physicians get sued.. and the majority are settled out of court, the physician never having a say in the matter. Anything with merit gets buried beneath a mountain of paperwork and legal hassels, jacking the prices even higher.
The notion that Tort reform will control costs is ridiculous. There is no guarantee the "cost savings" (as if there would be any) would be passed along to the physicians premiums, let alone on down to the patient.
How many times do we have to prove trickle down doesnt work?
And treating high blood pressure is always cheaper than treating a stroke or kidney failure. Preventative care isnt just about preventing high blood pressure. Its also about treating high blood pressure to prevent other complications.
The other problem is billing. Single payer would reduce not only the incidents of fraud and mistakes, but the need for more personnel and training would decrease. The number of billing errors would also go down. Will this cure all the problems? Nope.. but its one hell of a step closer... a huge step.

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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
Tort reform under the current system wont make a difference. Most physicians get sued.. and the majority are settled out of court, the physician never having a say in the matter. Anything with merit gets buried beneath a mountain of paperwork and legal hassels, jacking the prices even higher.
The notion that Tort reform will control costs is ridiculous. There is no guarantee the "cost savings" (as if there would be any) would be passed along to the physicians premiums, let alone on down to the patient.
How many times do we have to prove trickle down doesnt work?
And treating high blood pressure is always cheaper than treating a stroke or kidney failure. Preventative care isnt just about preventing high blood pressure. Its also about treating high blood pressure to prevent other complications.
The other problem is billing. Single payer would reduce not only the incidents of fraud and mistakes, but the need for more personnel and training would decrease. The number of billing errors would also go down. Will this cure all the problems? Nope.. but its one hell of a step closer... a huge step.

$60B a year in fraud out of $500B a year is a 12% fraud rate. I could find no reports of solid stats regarding health insurance fraud in non-Medicare insurers. The only real numbers I saw were $60-600B estimates. As that is a pretty hefty margin, I can not state with any accuracy whether or not Medicare's 12% fraud rate is better than, the same as, or worse than private insurer's fraud rates. I can state that 12% is not good, and will most likely get worse as Government "efficiency" rolls in.

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It's a common right-wing meme that malpractice awards drive the high cost of medicine. Not true.

"While Obama vowed to address physicians’ malpractice worries in a speech yesterday, annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard University economist. Chandra estimated the cost at $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion, in a 2005 study. Insurer WellPoint Inc. said last month that liability wasn’t driving premiums.

Obama told an American Medical Association meeting in Chicago yesterday that his efforts to cut costs and increase coverage couldn’t succeed without freeing doctors from the fear of lawsuits. While that may be what his audience needed to hear, the evidence that malpractice drives up health-care costs is “debatable,” said Robert Laszewski, an Alexandria, Virginia, consultant to health insurers and other companies.

“Medical malpractice dollars are a red herring,” Chandra said in a telephone interview. “No serious economist thinks that saving money in med mal is the way to improve productivity in the system. There’s so many other sources of inefficiency.”

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ORIGINAL: GrandPoobah
Why?
Too many reasons to detail them all, but it comes down to a simple edict: Follow the money.
Private insurance exists to make money.
Lack of insurance, often tied to lack of a job that provides said insurance means two things: No access to preventive care, which is always cheaper than fixing it later...and...when things finally get bad enough, the doctor is the ER...the most expensive place to get any service.
Defensive medicine: Doctors ordering too many tests, simply to cover their ass should somebody decide to sue them later.
And my favorite: the Profit motive. Here's a little example.
In Detroit, a health care provider wanted to build a new hospital. This despite the fact that existing facilities were averaging no more than 45% occupancy rates. The state board that looks at such things said...No, don't need more. The health care provider then got the state legislature to approve it anyway, citing the jobs it would provide. So...the new hospital was built...and then staffed...and insurance rates were raised to support a largely-empty, un-needed facility. We in the US can like it or not, but the fact is that a single-payer system that doesn't have a profit motive, would immediately drop the price of care...and cover everyone. The largest complaint about this, once you get past the screams of "socialize medicine" is usually that "some government official" will be making decisions about my medical care. Okay, perhaps. Compare with today, where your medical care is decided by a "Plan Administrator" who wants to ensure the company makes a good profit. Personally I'd trust the government guy.
You'll hear people complain about the NHS in the UK, or the service in Canada or Germany...but...you don't hear about anyone there dying for lack of insurance...or going bankrupt because they got sick.

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ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

You get what you pay for. If you don't like it go to Cuba, like Chaves just did..

France or Italy would be a much better bet. Only the most naive and foolish believes without question what the Right Wing (or Left Wing) media crams down their throat daily.

Here is the best data I could find. The US is a dismal #37.

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Lack of insurance does not kill people.

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ORIGINAL: kalikshama

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Lack of insurance does not kill people.

Uninsured and Dying Because of It
Abstract
The absence of health insurance creates a range of consequences, including lower quality of life, increased morbidity and mortality, and higher financial burdens. This paper focuses on just one aspect of this harm—namely, greater risk of death—and seeks to illustrate its general order of magnitude.
In 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that 18,000 Americans died in 2000 because they were uninsured. Since then, the number of uninsured has grown. Based on the IOM's methodology and subsequent Census Bureau estimates of insurance coverage, 137,000 people died from 2000 through 2006 because they lacked health insurance, including 22,000 people in 2006.
Introduction
As part of the IOM report, the authors sought to estimate the total number of deaths resulting from uninsurance. They began developing this estimate with two long-term, longitudinal studies observing the relationship between insurance status and death rates. One used 1971–87 data on 25- to 74-year-olds from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (Franks, Clancy, and Gold 1993). The other used Current Population Survey (CPS) data on 25- to 64-year-olds from 1982 to 1986 (Sorlie et al 1994). Although the two study populations differed, as did the potentially confounding characteristics for which the researchers controlled, both studies yielded estimates attributing to uninsurance an overall increase of 25 percent in mortality risk for working-age adults.
The IOM study combined this research result with information on the numbers of deaths and the percentages of people who are insured by 10-year age intervals. IOM researchers developed the following formula, which starts with the straightforward proposition that the number of total deaths in an age group is the sum of (a) deaths among insured members of that age group and (b) deaths among uninsured members of that age group.
Note that DU, or the number of deaths among the uninsured, is calculated through two steps. First, the IOM methodology ascertains the number of deaths among the uninsured as if everyone in the age cohort had insurance. That number is X (or the total number of deaths if everyone in the age cohort had insurance) times PU (or the proportion of people in the age cohort who lack insurance). Second, the number of deaths as if the uninsured had insurance is multiplied by 1.25. This yields an estimate of the actual number of deaths among the uninsured, reflecting the 25 percent higher mortality rate among the uninsured found by the above-described research.

(End of excerpt. The entire paper is available in PDF format.)

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ORIGINAL: SoftBonds

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It's a common right-wing meme that malpractice awards drive the high cost of medicine. Not true.

"While Obama vowed to address physicians’ malpractice worries in a speech yesterday, annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard University economist. Chandra estimated the cost at $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion, in a 2005 study. Insurer WellPoint Inc. said last month that liability wasn’t driving premiums.

Obama told an American Medical Association meeting in Chicago yesterday that his efforts to cut costs and increase coverage couldn’t succeed without freeing doctors from the fear of lawsuits. While that may be what his audience needed to hear, the evidence that malpractice drives up health-care costs is “debatable,” said Robert Laszewski, an Alexandria, Virginia, consultant to health insurers and other companies.

“Medical malpractice dollars are a red herring,” Chandra said in a telephone interview. “No serious economist thinks that saving money in med mal is the way to improve productivity in the system. There’s so many other sources of inefficiency.”

Where are the different numbers coming from???

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Once you are past infancy, health care doesn't actually allow you to live. All it does, is allow you to live longer.

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ORIGINAL: kalikshama
Did you read the report? Here's an excerpt:
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411588_uninsured_dying.pdf
The IOM’s 2002 report, Care
Without Coverage: Too Little, Too
Late, described the considerable
research showing that the absence
of health coverage impedes access to
care, which ultimately increases the risk
of illness and death. Uninsured women
with breast cancer, for example, have
their disease diagnosed later during its
development, when treatment is less
effective (Ayanian et al. 1993; Roetzheim
et al. 1999, 2000; Lee-Feldstein et al.
2000; cited in IOM 2002). Uninsured
men with hypertension are more likely
to go without screenings and prescribed
medication and to skip recommended
doctor visits, increasing the likelihood of
serious harm (Ayanian et al. 2000; Keeler
et al. 1985; Huttin, Moeller, and Stafford
2000; Fish-Parcham 2001; cited in IOM
2002).