07-15-2007, 05:27 AM
The major reason we have the health care system we do is that some people are making a lot of money from the current setup and, to a large degree, they control the conversation on this topic. Our basic corruption, in terms of good health, is insertion of the profit motive. It is essentially a very large overhead cost added on to providing the actual healthcare. In addition, private insurance focuses on relatively small "groups." Health insurance, like any insurance, works best the larger the risk pool. That is why single payer national health insurance is the only option that makes fiscal sense for everyone.
Health insurance is not hard to analyze. There are basically five parts. The first four are simple. Accounts receivable to collect our payments, accounts payable to pay the doctors, hospitals, etc., actuarial to calculate rates of illnessness, cost of various courses of treatment and local cost variations among other issues, and, finally, administration/security to deal with fraud, privacy, computer systems, efficiency of paperwork and so forth.
The fifth part, policy, is the hard part. Here you have to decide how far to take treatments, what sort of treatments to support, such as more experimental treatments, whether distinctions should be made between the young and elderly and so forth. All this results in how payment rates are set. Reducing treatment results in lower payments, expanding treatment costs more. Policy is the aspect that needs to be as transparent as possible to society as a whole.
Medicaid supposedly runs on a 3 percent overhead cost. This is basically what health insurance should be costing us to run.
Health insurance is not hard to analyze. There are basically five parts. The first four are simple. Accounts receivable to collect our payments, accounts payable to pay the doctors, hospitals, etc., actuarial to calculate rates of illnessness, cost of various courses of treatment and local cost variations among other issues, and, finally, administration/security to deal with fraud, privacy, computer systems, efficiency of paperwork and so forth.
The fifth part, policy, is the hard part. Here you have to decide how far to take treatments, what sort of treatments to support, such as more experimental treatments, whether distinctions should be made between the young and elderly and so forth. All this results in how payment rates are set. Reducing treatment results in lower payments, expanding treatment costs more. Policy is the aspect that needs to be as transparent as possible to society as a whole.
Medicaid supposedly runs on a 3 percent overhead cost. This is basically what health insurance should be costing us to run.