Michael Moore's "Sicko"

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[MVPSPORTS]

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[Nortonesque]

[Felonius_Monk]

[black_knight6]

[Nortonesque]

[k3nt]

Monk wants to know why our system is so expensive.

A bunch of reasons, I think, but as I understand it the top 2 are:

(1) We do not invest in primary care. Treating people after they get seriously sick, especially in emergency rooms, is about 18374650394756 times more expensive than providing them with good medical care on an ongoing basis. (You can cover heart pills that will keep someone from getting a heart attack for a few pennies per day, or you can treat that heart attack in the emergency room for a few tens of thousands of dollars.) Our current system gives incentives to precisely nobody to keep people healthy over long periods of time.

Insurance companies, for instance, know that most of their customers who are age 25 will not still be their customers once they turn 50. So why should they care whether their 25 year old customers get the preventive health care that will help keep them from getting seriously ill at 50?

The only exception to this pattern in the US is the Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals, which know that they have their patients for life, in most cases. The VA invests heavily in preventive care, and their overall per-patient costs are much, much lower than any other health care organization in America.

Also, doctors get paid on a fee-for-service basis. Which do you think makes them more money, preventing a heart attack, or treating one?

(2) Paperwork and red tape. There are a crazy number of insurance companies out there, each of which offers a 193846756384 different plans, with different co-pays, covered illnesses, etc., etc. Hospitals spend some crazy percentage of their income paying secretaries to deal with all the paperwork and all of the red tape from all of the different insurance companies. I think I've read that something like 20-25% of costs go to that, if you can imagine. In single-payer countries, costs are much lower.

Ahh, found a link.

http://www.healthcareforall.org/facts.html

Minimum cost in dollars of medical bureaucracy per capita in the US: 1,059 [9]

Cost per capita in Canada’s single payer system: 307 [9]

Footnote [9]: Woolhandler, Steffie. 8/20/03. New England Journal of Medicine Study Shows U.S. Health Care Paperwork Cost $294.3 Billion in 1999. Harvard Medical School Office of Public Affairs.

The difference between the US and Canada on this one factor is $750 per person, per year. Remember, total health costs are about $2,600 higher per person in the US than in Canada. $750 of that is paperwork.

So your share of the excess paperwork bill (which does nothing to make anybody healthier) is more than 60 bucks a month -- $120 if you're married, $300 if you're married with 3 kids. Per month, every month. Just insane.

[Felonius_Monk]

[k3nt]

[black_knight6]

[Felonius_Monk]

[EscapePlan9]

[Felonius_Monk]

[black_knight6]