The future we are being herded toward is all too obvious. Doctors who are no longer our personal physician, medications designed to provide a lifetime of monthly payments to the pharmaceutical industry, mega-hospitals owned by corporate holding companies more driven by the stock market than service to the community, and computerized billing systems so complex a Certified Public Accountant can’t verify the accuracy of a hospital bill. After all, what Public Accountant is going to be allowed to see a hospital’s Provider Agreement that places strict limits on what we can billed?
Yes, we are constantly assured these changes will improve our access to quality healthcare. The underlying argument being that with these changes comes greater efficiency and with greater efficiency comes lower costs along with higher quality care for you and me. But, wait a minute! How can all the huge expansions to hospitals, the new research facilities, the countless new neighborhood clinics, the flood of drugs entering the market, and the explosion of new drug stores lead to lower costs. It can’t! Do the math. Somebody has to pay for all this “stuff” and we are the only ones in line.
The truth is that we are an aging population that can only create a growing demand for healthcare – expensive healthcare. Adding to this is the remarkable growth in technology that is expanding the field of care rather than providing less costly treatments. Care that didn’t exist only a few years ago is now routinely prescribed as necessary. Where our parents suffered with knees and hips that grew increasingly painful with age, we now expect to have them replaced. However, the $50,000 bill that our parents “plan” would have never seen is now an everyday expense. And, where our parents would have taken the occasional aspirin for pain, our generation takes at least one prescription drug a day with 20% of us taking more than five prescription drugs a day. Which is to say the cost of healthcare is going up.
In a time when wages for working families are increasingly stretched and countless families are falling below the poverty level, the nation’s healthcare providers are hard at work raising the cost of healthcare for each and every one of us. Consequently, our healthcare “plans” are doing everything they can to cut what they pay for coverage. Which leaves us increasingly stuck in the middle to foot the bill.
In the March 4, 2013, edition of Time magazine, Steven Brill did a masterful job of describing where our healthcare is headed. According to Brill, it has become “a uniquely American gold rush.” Brill goes on to report that “the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt nonprofit hospitals into the town’s most profitable business and largest employers, often presided over by the region’s most richly compensated executives.” In fact, the new corporate centers for this “gold rush” literally scream money and power.
Representing roughly twenty percent of the nation’s GDP, the healthcare industry will generate over three trillion dollars in revenue for the coming year. That’s trillion with a “t.” And, to insure this flood of money keeps pouring in, the healthcare industry spent $5.36 billion lobbying Congress as compared to roughly $2 billion by the entire defense and aerospace industry.
The Bottom Line:
Under our capitalistic system, insurers can pretty much market whatever they choose. We not only allow it, we encourage it. However, an insurance company’s freedom to market a product can’t void our right to the care our doctor prescribes as “necessary” healthcare. This is something no insurance company or “plan” can change. Unless, of course, you and I allow it. Unless you and I fail to insist on our right to the care our doctor prescribes and not having to pay one penny more than the healthcare industry’s carefully hidden Provider Agreements allow.