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5 Common Free Agent Myths
5 Common Free Agent Myths Copyright 2002 Paul Bednar There are numerous myths about free agents. On the surface, they appear not to be myths but facts. However, get below the surface and these misconceptions quickly crumble. This article will not...
An Honest Look at Your Business
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Business Plan Basics
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Writing a business plan is essential to the success of any...
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You've read many articles I'm sure about the advantages and disadvantages of working for yourself from your own home. Many of them I've written myself, in fact. But how many articles have you read that give equal time to the advantages of...
Why is it more profitable for an Indian to take up Work At Home Business?
I am writing this article to help all fellow Indians
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Is the Medicalcare System still a disaster in US?
The state of Medical care in the US is pretty much a disaster
(unless you're rich or have a good-paying job from a major
corporation or the government that covers your medical expenses)
and it's something that I'm sure I'd spend more time talking
about on this blog. While the issue is often presented as
greatly complicated, Medical care is really quite a simple
concept. Medical
insurance is a pretty simple concept-individuals pooling
their resources so that when one of their numbers falls ill, he
or she can afford to pay for treatment. That's really all it
boils down to. (The only real question here should be whether
the managers of those pooled resources are entitled to place
their own interests-i.e., profits-above the needs of the
insured.) A kidney transplant or open heart surgery costs a
fortune. Several years pay, for most people. You can't set aside
10 or 15 or 20% of your life earnings for an unforeseen medical
crisis, not when you've got bills to pay and a house to buy and
kids to provide for and college loans to pay off, and perhaps
even elderly parents with medical problems (not covered
adequately by their insurance) to help financially. The thing
is, not everyone will need such an expensive procedure. Lots of
people never have a stroke and spend 20 days in ICU and another
3 months in the hospital, or crash their motorcycle and need
emergency spinal surgery and a motorized wheel chair for the
rest of their lives. Which is why procedures that cost 3 or 4x
more than any one individual pays into the insurance fund are
affordable; other people who pay more than they get back make up
for it? That's why it's called insurance; it's there if you need
it, but you hope that you won't. And oddly enough, it's about
the only investment that people are happy not to get their
money's worth out of it. After all, would you rather have a
near-fatal heart attack and get back more than you paid in, or
not have that heart attack at all? So what's Bush's solution?
Who needs Medical insurance?
We'll just give you a tax cut so you can save up money for your
own medical needs! We're a self-reliant nation, after all!
Working together as a society-that's socialism! Like the godless
Canadians have! Hell, why don't you just study up and perform
your own appendectomy, while you're at it? Given the rate of
savings in this country, and the state of the actual economy,
most people might manage to save just about enough money for a
single MRI. If they're lucky. After that, it's back to the
emergency room, I guess. I'd think it's fairly obvious that in a
country where the average person (Democrat or Republican) is
juggling about $5k in credit card debt and living in a house
they really can't afford while trying to figure how they'll be
able to pay for their kid's text books, much less tuition, the
percentage of regular people who can actually take advantage of
a tax credit to save for their own medical crisis is fairly low.
And that most of the people who can are very rich people, much
like the president and all of his closest friends, family
members, and high ranking Republican supporters and donors. Not
that I'm implying this is anything other than a complete
coincidence. The evil socialist solution to the Medical care
(cost) crisis is a hot discussion these days. Something like the
Canadian system (or something similar, like what they have in
virtually every European nation), where they have single payer
insurance, i.e. a system of Medical care run by the government
and funded by the tax payers. The primary benefit of this,
besides universal coverage, is that with a single payer (the
government) all of the individual drug companies and hospitals
and other such Medical care
providers have to negotiate with them, and this drastically
lowers prices for services. That's why prescription medications
in Canada cost a fraction of what they do in the US. It's also
why big pharmaceutical companies give millions of dollars to the
Republicans and Democrats in the US to be sure that things stay
just the way they are. Not that I'm implying that this is
anything other than a complete coincidence. The other major
benefit of single payer insurance is that all of the parasitical
middlemen (i.e. insurance companies) would be driven out of
business, and the billions of dollars they earn in "profits"
would vanish, returning to the consumer's pockets and going to
the government fund to pay for more treatments for sick people,
and probably also going to doctors to pay off their student
loans and earn them better livings. I've never seen a full cost
break down, but it seems to me that the whole thing would save
money just by eliminating the profit motive for insurance
companies, not even factoring in the billions lower costs of
medications and treatments would save. Of course there'd need to
be a great increase in the size of government to administrate it
all, and taxes would pay for their salaries, and conservatives
are steadfastly opposed to increasing government, unless it's
the parts of government that blow things up or spy on US
citizens. The other huge money saver would be getting poor
people insured.
As you often read news stories about; poor people without
insurance can't get preventative care, and have to wait until
they have some huge emergency, at which point they end up in an
emergency room, rack up $10k in expenses to fix something that a
prescription would have cleared up six months previously, and
stick the tax payers or the hospital with the bill,
since they
can't pay it, and they don't have Medical insurance. Like the
old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure, and that holds true for most things in life. It's just
that prevention requires intelligence and foresight and logic
and planning, and those are things in short supply in all levels
of government at this time. One downside (sort of) is that in
theory, many of the private insurance companies would be
combined or would volunteer to become the new branch of
government that ran the Medical care
insurance system for the nation, so the loss of jobs from
that wouldn't be enormous, and you'd have people who already had
years of denying expensive treatment until it was too late
moving right into their new civil service jobs doing the same
thing for tax payers. But since the net result would be far
fewer people doing the same amount of work, with all of the
redundancies removed, there would still be quite a few
ex-Medical insurance industry employees who would have to find
honest work. Most private companies spend a lot of time and
money organising their own Medical insurance system, or
negotiating with HMOs over the non-treatment and non-payment of
their employees, and you know they'd be overjoyed to just turn
the whole thing over to the government. It would remove a
headache for them, and employees would probably get more per
paycheque also, since they wouldn't be paying for the very
expensive private Medical care they are now. Of course to make
any of this happen would take enormous political clout and
popular support.
Clinton tried it when he first took office, but the combined
lobbying might of the insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical
industries, together with a blitzkrieg of very
effectively-misleading commercials killed public support to the
point that the craven, industry-owned dogs we call congressmen
could vote against it and get away with it. It would also
require short term expenses for long term savings, and that's
something that the current US government, run entirely by short
attention span, dessert first-ers is entirely incapable of, as
well as steadfastly-opposed to. Bush certainly sets the example
with his new programs and tax cuts that are okay now, but become
incredibly expensive years after he's out of office, but those
are all approved by congress as well, since they well know the
attention span of the US public is even shorter than theirs.
Tell the people what they want to hear and postpone the bill,
and you'll go far in politics. Balanced budgets and taxes to
cover your expenses are simply out of the question in the
current "that's what credit cards are for" mindset of our
culture. When this changes and if it takes a turn to a colossal
financial crisis to change, it is an issue that most economists
spend their time debating. And the same goes for the Medical
care system, though it's hard to imagine just how broken it will
have to be before anyone cares enough to fight powerful industry
foes to fix it.
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About the author:
Sr. Insurance Expert
Medical Insurance Individual |
Medical Insurance California |
Blue Cross Insurance
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