Quote:
Originally Posted by Relentless
The Old system was terrible.
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The "old system" was fine.
You got sick you went to the doctor and you paid for it. I even paid for an appendectomy for my stepson in 1985 out of my pocket (and I was just a musician playing in bands at nightclubs...the operation and hospital stay was $3500 complete).
It's the "new system" that is fucked up.
Once companies started being required to carry all sorts of insurance for people, and doctors started getting sued for astronomical amounts and also were required to carry all kinds of insurance...THAT is when the price of health care went through the roof over the last 20 years.
In my opinion from what I've seen in my lifetime, INSURANCE companies are a major part of the problem.
I lived my childhood in Fla. near Tampa. Nobody we knew had health insurance. Everybody just went to the doctor and/or hospital if needed and paid for it.
I lived my young adult life in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale in the 1980's Same thing.
But somewhere around the late 1980's I read all kinds of articles in Newsweek and Time about rising health care costs and what was causing it.
And today in 2012...if you go to the doctor it's a big deal financially.
My wife had a sinus infection a month ago. Doctor prescribed an antibiotic to kill it. A week later it came back. So he needed to prescribe a different antibiotic. Which he did and it worked....BUT, he also had her get a CAT scan of her sinuses to make sure.
Did she need the CAT scan? No. Our doctor and his wife are friends of ours as well as just my doctor. And he told me that his malpractice insurance pretty much forces him to order that CAT scan of her sinuses even though he already knows it's not needed!
That's the kind of thing that drives up costs (that and the fact that the big pharmaceutical companies price gouge the U.S. citizens by charging 2 and 3 times the cost of medications as compared to the rest of the world)
So the answer that our career politicians in Congress came up with and was approved by the President?
MORE INSURANCE FOR EVERYONE!!!
Pure genius.
