Quote:
Originally Posted by fazool
There is one gigantic historical foundation that most people are not aware of.
Comparing US costs is not helpful without this background information.
A long time ago, victims of accidents had to hire and pay a lawyer to represent them. Lawyers could not divert from their stable income-earning efforts to take on risky cases. Conversely, rich people could afford massive legal teams and often out-spend their opponents.
The result was that poor victims were not represented properly against liabilities and rich victims always were. There was a massive unfairness to the victims. If you hit a poor pedestrian on the street, don't worry they can't afford a lawyer.
So, the USA enacted regulations that allowed lawyers to keep 1/3rd of any liability judgement. The idea was to incentivize lawyers to take on those clients who couldn't otherwise pay.
This system was massively abused by greed and this is the reason you see hourly accident lawyer commercials. You can track on a graph the gigantic spike in liability settlements to when this occurred. This is what directly led to gigantic lawsuits. Lawyers had massive incentives to push for absurdly large judgments.
So,......this abused system resulted in gigantic lawsuits which, in turn, led to massive insurance and malpractice costs.
This, is what drove the USA healthcare costs to be the worst ratio of quality-to-cost in the developed world.
And you will never change this situation until you "undo" or reign in what caused it.
We have the most amazing doctors and scientists and provide fantastic healthcare. But the cost is driven by the lawyers and accountants.
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The husband of a couple who we get together with on a regularly basis debunked this story. He is the hospital's Director, a 400 bed facility, and explained the costs which insurance carrying individuals pay are supporting those who arrive in the ER and have no insurance and no way to pay (who by law they must treat), and those on Medicare and Medicaid who's reimbursement to the hospital & doctors for procedures does not cover the out of pocket cost for the hospital or doctor.
He always says the amount billed to insurance companies for those with insurance or individuals with the financial means to pay out of pocket are carrying/paying for those unable to pay, and those on medicare and medicated. He said until the mandate for individuals to have insurance was a start to fix a broken system.
He said the mandate to have mandatory health insurance was good start as it assured the hospital would be reimbursed and thus held down the cost they passed along to insurance and cash paying patients. Given his background and experience his comments seemed very reasonable.