Health Care vs. Campaign Finance
by matt at 6:00 am on July 19th, 2007 in Health CareLinking campaign financing to what’s wrong with the health care system - Nieman Watchdog (7/16/07):
Think about it. Had the insurance industry not been a major contributor, we’d have fixed our health care system years ago. Its biggest single problem is the huge portion of total health care costs – about 31 percent, according to a group called Physicians for a National Health Program and others – that are consumed by the insurance and billing bureaucracy without ever providing direct patient care. Costs for marketing, broker sales commissions, actuarial costs, gatekeepers, high executive salaries, increasing shareholder profits, even the high costs of their lobbying and campaign contributions are passed on to the patient (and in most cases employers, who have been taking their jobs offshore to avoid the costs).
Eliminate that waste and we could expand health care coverage to 100 percent of our people for the same dollars we spend to cover just 85 percent today.
This of course is the reason for “high healthcare costs.”
i hate oxford wrote:
i spent 51 minutes on the phone with my insurance company yesterday and got nowhere. i’m trying to get pre-conception genetic testing. apparently, genetic testing is only “medically necessary” (and therefore covered) once a woman is pregnant. my doctor explained that all the necessary tests could be done in the first trimester allowing “plenty of time,” by which she meant “plenty of time to abort.” so here we have plenty of technology to allow couples to make informed choices about conceiving, but health insurance companies who withhold funds for such tests, but who would pay for an abortion if the tests, done later, would make that medically necessary. brilliant.
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 6:21 am ¶