You get what you pay for

H/T to Don Surber

3 Responses to ““To bring Canada’s health system up to global standards, the country would immediately need to add 26,000 doctors.””

1. www.healthbookforyou.info » “To bring Canada's health system up to global standards, the …
   January 10, 2008 - 10:15 AM on January 10th, 2008

   [...] Pam placed an observative post today on “To bring Canada’s health system up to global standards, the ….Here’s a quick excerpt:You get what you pay for. H/T to Don Surber. Tags: Canada,, Universal, Healthcare. [...]

2. PCD
   January 10, 2008 - 11:57 AM on January 10th, 2008

   I disagree. In Canada you just get robbed by the government and screwed, too.

3. FrmrArtyOffcr
   January 11, 2008 - 08:26 PM on January 11th, 2008

   Here’s a little bit of information from the AMA.

   Medicare had been paying doctors the same allowable charges since 2001 despite an estimated increase in office operating expenses over over 15%.

   January 1st, Medicare REDUCED their payments to doctors by 10% from the 2001 allowable charges rates.

   Medicare is intended to reduce the amounts of the allowable charges another 30% over the next 9 years. That means that the government intends to pay doctors 40% less for the same services in 2016 as they were paying in 2001.

   The allowable charge for any service is based on the AVERAGE cost for that service nationally. That means that doctors in midtown Manhatten are being paid based on the charges for a doctor in some little rural town in Kentucky and the amount of that payment is going down even further. What that means is that doctors in higher cost of living areas,such as cities, will have to either stop accepting Medicare/Medicaid, force their patients to pay the difference, or go out of business.

   Here’s a question for the supporters of universal Government healthcare. If the government can’t afford to pay doctors an appropriate fee for the few million that it currently is trying to cover, what makes you believe that it will be able to do so when that number goes up 10-20 fold?

   It is possible to fix the problem, it’s just not through government intervention. Good old fashioned competition in the market place can work wonders to reduce prices. Texas currently has more doctors applying for licenses than it has people to process the applications. Why? Texas passed tort reform that prevents ambulance chasers like John Edwards from bankrupting a doctor’s malpractice insurance carrier over some bum who gets an infected hangnail.As a result, malpractice insurance premiums are MUCH lower in Texas allowing doctors to have lower overhead and hence lower prices.

   Another thing that can help would be to educate the public about how insurance works. It makes absolutely no sense for someone who’s healthy to carry a policy with a deductible below $2000. The difference in annual premiums is more than that. If they’re afraid of being in an accident, they can buy an accident rider for the policy that will cover the deductible for next to nothing. Why healthy people would pay an extra $150 – 200 /month in premiums just to have $15 office visits that they’ll never use, I do not understand. When I was selling insurance, I tried to explain to a business owner how it would save him $10,000+ a year if his employees had $1000 deductibles and he self insured for the difference between the $1000 and the current $250 deductible. He simply did not understand the concept that if the insurance costs $200/person/month more for the lower deductible, he would save $1400/person annually if he simply paid the $1000 deductible himself. And that was if the person ever used the deductible. If the person didn’t go to the doctor, or went minimally, he would save even more of the $2400 annual difference in premiums.

   Here’s a question for those people with employer provided insurance who want the government to provide insurance for everyone else. Do you think that your employer is going to continue paying for your insurance once the government starts forcing him to pay for insurance for people who don’t work for him?

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