The New Testament tells us to give to others, preferably directly. It does NOT tell us to give more of our money to the gov’t so it can dole out smaller pittances for the same purpose.

And as a patient and someone who works peripherally with the medical field, I think HIPAA should be done away with. I haven’t seen it do a thing for me or the docs and nurses I know except create more paperwork and more ways to run afoul of the gov’t. It certainly hasn’t improved the portability of my health insurance or the quality of my health care.

hmmm

But, y’know…they *don’t* talk about the burnout case in the next bed over with ten out of ten back pain and he’s allergic to everything but Vicodin. They don’t talk about the family of twelve who’ve all come in for a checkup and free dental work, and they’re communicating through an eight-year-old girl because she’s the only one who speaks English. They don’t talk about the doctor who orders an MRI on everyone who walks in the door because he’s trying to dodge a lawsuit. They don’t talk about the inspector telling you that you need to buy a $10,000 cabinet for every printer because putting the paper in the floor is a trip hazard.

It’s not like we don’t have money in the system to help people. We just choose to spend it on bureaucracy and frivolousness.

So…he can’t just let you pay OOP? He can’t just work out a “payment plan” (i.e. you pay him twenty bucks and he writes you a script or a test order)?

Maybe the issue here isn’t so much Medicaid not paying, as it is doctors who can’t imagine charging anything but premium prices and being paid by anything but Medicaid.

Even though we would like to pretend it is unlimited. It is not.

Economics 101 teaches us that we use pricing to control access to scarce economic resources. The scarcer the item, or the more resources it takes, the more expensive the cost.

In the days before health insurance, if you couldn’t afford treatment, and couldn’t find someone to give you charity, you went without the treatment.

Insurance and Government programs have upset that paradigm. Very few patients, or their families, look at or care what the bottom line cost of their treatment is. “Damn it, I’m sick, and I deserve it no matter the cost”.

Mandatory Insurance Premiums for everyone is a Federal Tax with a new name. Paid to someone else besides the Government. Whole new levels of bureaucracies working to make a living for themselves and in most cases, profit for companies. Supposedly, this will make the system more efficient. The reality is that we would get more health care dollars if we just raised the medicare tax and put everyone on Medicare from birth. People who can afford Medicare supplamental insurance could pay for extra coverage.

But remember, the Government is not a source of Charity. The Government at best is amoral. Charity is giving of yourself freely. Charity helps a person become more unselfish. Taxes extracted by threat of Government Force is never charitible.

Also, based on reading various medical opinion blogs: good luck getting people to help you treat your lung cancer if you ever smoked, because you deserve to have it. Ditto diabetes if you’re fat.

How about a system that charges people what they can afford? Using a sliding fee model to charge people insurance (or direct medical costs) based on their income, subsidized by gov.