[Gimpy]

Originally Posted by 1CAVCCO15MED

Medicare is one of the few payers that have tried to cut down on health care costs. Medicare has something called DRGs. It is a price list for all the diagnoses in medicine. If you get this, your MD and hospital will get paid this much. Period. It doesn't matter how much trouble you have or how many procedures you have they only pay a certain amount. Every few years they cut how much they pay for DRGS. As far as the free enterprise system nobody fears it more than the insurance monopolies. As long as they are chartered state by state there will be no competition. When it was attempted for Medicare to bargain for the lowest prices on drugs, it was lobbied out of existance by the drug industry and their employees in the Senate and House. HMO's and insurance companies dictate which doctor you will see, You have no choice to keep your personal MD if they are not on the list of approved providers. I live in what is called the Tri cities area. Who you work for decides what physician you will see and what city of the three you will have to travel to to see them and what hospital you will go to. Add to that most of the insurances are now paying by DRGs now so there is no shopping around, no bargain hunting, no keeping your own doctor, not even going to the hospital in the city you live in in many cases. You have no choice. You could get your own insurance but you or none of you families had better ever had a chronic disease. You're on your own, sucker. Plus it is a lot easier to deny your claim or cut your coverage if you are not in a group. It is great if you never use it, however. And when is the last time any part of the health care economy ever had a sale? Every patient coming into any heath care institution is offered counseling on end of life decisions if they want them as required by the Joint Commison on the Accreditation of Hospitals in exactly the same manner that is prescribed in the heath care bill. The same way it is prescribed by Medicare. If that was "death panels" why, I was on one for decades. Advanced directives, no heroics, durable power of attorney for health care, all this I did. Guilty. By LAW every person in this country, legal or not, is given all the free health care they need. It has always been that way. If you deny care to anyone and they die, then you are by LAW a murderer. Who pays for this care? You do. You always have. You always will. That is one of the legitimate reasons health insurance is so high. So, under the present system hospitals have to care for everyone and they are dictated what they will be paid. If a hospital was a car dealership, everyone gets a car whether they can pay for it or not, and they might need a Rolls-Royce. If you do have insurance there is a very good chance the health care institution will do unnecessary tests to help pay for expensive systems. Think CT scans and MRIs. Physicians know what insurance sources there are for covering them and they make sure those covered patients get more than their share of these examinations.

You can't keep your own physican, there is no law that requires that. You can be forced to change them and even forced to go to a hospital miles away from your home when you live next door to a hospital. Health insurances pay whatever they want and drug and medical equipment companies can charge hospitals participating in Medicare whatever they want and by LAW they can't complain. There was a insurance company that paid its CEO a quarter billion dollars a year who kept the profits up by giving bonuses to claims accountants who turn down the most claims.

This is how the free enterprise system operates in health care. Now we are on the verge of a new system and the real winners are the health monopolies. Business as usual. Maybe if you hated liberals more? That'll fix it.

What my old friend Doc Fred said!

Gimp