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Categories - Copywriting - Shopping - Free Online Business Help - Telecommunications Services Articles: Health - Health Care Destruction The U.S. is not the only country with health care problems. Health care costs have been exploding in most developed nations and, as a result, treatments are being cut back and access to medical care is being reduced. In England, if you are 60 or older, you cannot get a stint if you need one and no attempt is made to treat advanced breast cancer in women. In Canada, if you get injured while skiing and you need an MRI to diagnose your injuries and save your life, the chances are almost zero that one will be available. While the U.S. prepares to spend millions, perhaps billions, on the relatively minor Swine Flu virus, diseases like diabetes and cancer are at epidemic levels in spite of new treatments and drugs. The problem is not that healthcare providers are private. It is that they have been regulated, in many cases, almost out of existence. All of the health care in these countries, including the U.S., is socialized and managed by bureaucracies. Whenever you put the high cost of a bureaucracy between the consumer and the provider, prices have to go up to pay for the bureaucracy as many unneeded procedures are added along with licensing fees are added as the bureaucracy becomes more and more out of touch with the consumer. As lobbyists petition the bureaucracy, a doctor visit for a broken finger, sprained ankle, cold, or earache become a series of x-rays, blood tests, more visits and perhaps even a hospital stay. As a result of the low payments from Medicare and Medicaid, suppliers introduce their products at very high prices so they will get what they would normally charge and patients paying for their own care or private insurance companies suffer from high prices caused by socialized insurance.
Health care costs have risen in direct correspondence with the number of people being served by Medicare and Medicaid.
The socialized part of health care now provides 70% of the care and includes Medicare, Medicaid, the Indian Health Service, the Department of Veteran Affairs, the Public Health Service, and programs such as KidCare along with the bulk of medical research, which includes the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, National Heart Institute, and about 30 other government institutes. All of these are taxpayer funded and insulated from market competition that would keep the prices down. Before anyone sees a benefit from any of these government-run agencies, the cost of the bureaucracy is added. There are 133,000 pages of Medicare rules and each page adds cost.
After the taxpayers have spent $30 billion, the number of cancer occurrences has risen by 45%. Taxpayer funded researchers are primarily concerned with keeping their jobs and spend a lot of time and money justifying them. If government researchers found a cure for cancer, their jobs would be eliminated. If research was handled by the private sector, the only way that researchers would keep their jobs is by finding cures for diseases.
The rest of the health care is provided by the regulated sector, which people mistakenly call the private sector. Private insurance companies, HMOs, and licensed pharmacists and physicians must play by the rules imposed by the socialized sector if they want to get paid or even be allowed to practice. Of course, the rules are thousands of pages and serve mostly to drive costs up. This cannot, by any means, be thought of as free market or private. They must provide the services that the government tells them to in order to exist. Through taxpayer funded grants and subsidies, Medical schools are also dictated to and influence. No part of the U.S. health care system is untouched by government bureaucracy.
As the country developed and the government expanded, it became more and more susceptible to special interests through the lobbying process. The number of medical schools and doctors also increased substantially and the competition keeping prices down caused alarm among doctors who felt that they should be making more money. They formed the American Medical Association around 1850 with a goal of restricting the number of doctors and the number of medical colleges. By 1940, the number of medical schools had been reduced from 140 to 77. The AMA now controls how many medical schools exist, how many students enroll, what is taught in the schools, the availability of hospital residencies, and, indirectly through licensing laws, who will get jobs in medicine.
As soon as the FDA was established, it began to be lobbied and infiltrated by food and drug companies who would manipulate it on their behalf. As a result, this bureaucracy, instead of operating on behalf of and protecting the people, operates almost exclusively for the advancement of large food and drug companies. The FDA habitually puts small farmers out of business and regulates for the creation of less healthy and fattening processed foods while preventing medical drug breakthroughs by small organizations with its costly testing and regulation. If you are an individual scientist, by the time you get paying the government what it wants, you have no money left to bring your innovation to market and it just sits on the shelf in the lab you have made in your garage. In the meantime, large companies are favored and their less effective and often damaging new products are released in order to maintain or improve their revenue streams.
Doctors are also required to prescribe approved drugs and those who do not and recommend harmless medications like vitamins have their licenses revoked. Any alternative medicine practitioners are squeezed out and harmless but effective treatments that have been around for decades are no longer allowed. In addition, if you want to have a blood test for cancer or aids, you cannot just go to a lab. While some free clinics offer aids and other STD testing for free under a doctor’s supervision, the vast majority of the public must first go to a doctor who will say that you are allowed to have a test for cholesterol, sugar, cancer, or anything else that concerns you. You must then schedule another doctor visit to have the results read to you. A $10 to $100 test ends up being $200 to $1000.
The cause of all of this has been the government’s catering to special interest. Now, as the government attempts to implement government-run health care, the public is up in arms while not realizing that their health care is already government-run which is the cause of all health care problems. The only way to fix this is to go back and eliminate the bills, regulations, and bureaucracies that have caused the problem.
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