The health care mess

With people living longer our population is aging and medical services are more in demand. The law of supply and demand dictate that the cost of something increases when there is more demand for the service. That explains some of the increase in cost. The other component is the new or improved equipment constantly being introduced. Thes things are so expensive that a hospital is forced to increase the rates of other services in order to help pay for the diagnostic and treatment equipment.

Another problem in medical costs is that there are those who cannot pay, especially those who go to the emergency ward of a hospital. These costs must be passed on to those who can pay, ie., those who have insurance. I have been to a few emergency wards and it seems to me that a lot of those people who come in there probably could have gone to a regular doctor for treatment. But if they have no money to pay for the treatment, they probably have no choice but to go to the emergency room. The other problem is that because people can't afford medical treatment, they wait until their condition is so bad that they have to go to the emergency room.

I guess I could cite stastics stating how much rates have gone up because of high malpractice insurance or the high cost of the new equipment or the high costs of drugs, etc. That still won't adequately explain why we have such high rates. I would like to cut to the chase and just state my premise. We have high insurance rates because we demand more medical care than before.

Years ago when my parents would take me to Dr. Morrison, he would give me either green colored medicine or pink colored medicine depending on what type of ailment I had. Now when we go to a doctor, numerous tests are run with expensive equipment, blood tests are taken, xrays, etc. Whether we want it or need it, the medical profession keeps expanding its horizons, inventing new machines, new drugs, new technology and then offering it to us. How can we turn it down? We will do anything to find out the cause of our ailment, anything to extend our lives. What price can you put on your health?

Much of our medical expenses are due to drugs that we never had years ago. Anti-depression drugs, tranquilizers, chlolesterol drugs, pain relievers, insulin, hypertension drugs, etc. None of these drugs were available years ago and now we demand them.

Doctors today are burdened with excessive paperwork imposed both by the government and the insurance companies. This creates an additional expense that has to be passed on to the patient. It also causes many doctors to throw in the towel. I had a friend who retired from his practice for this reason. In addition, my personal physician from Chicago 15 years ago quit because of the overload of paperwork required.

I am now in a race to get to the age of 65 for medicare before my health insurance premiums break me. Quite frankly, most people my age (61) can only afford a premium with a very high deductible which means more than likely you will pay for most of your health care costs yourself. In effect, you carry a health insurance policy for catastrophic purposes only.

My brother told me that 80% of Medicare costs are spent on people in the last six months of their lives. Heroic measures to extend the life of a person in which there is no quality of life left should be questioned. These extraordinary costs almost have to be absorbed by other patients.

It seems to me that any entity that depends for the payment of its services by insurance companies, is less likely to have adequate cost controls simply because it knows that it is going to get paid. In addition, the reluctance of a customer to buy something because of the price, is removed when there is no decision to be made. You either have that heart bypass or your're dead. Here's the price. Take it or leave it. You can't go to Walmart and get one instead.

There is no one easy solution to the health care mess. However, it appears to me that medical advances are an unique entity. Typically, someone develops a product hoping someday that it will be embraced by consumer demand that results in profit for the producer. In the medical profession, however, new devices are developed to advance the medical technology without any hope that the purchaser of the product like a hospital could ever recover the costs of the new device from patients who receive use from it. It has to be subsidized by other patients who do not benefit from the new technology. In effect, we are paying higher rates to pay for technology that most of us will probably never need.

As long as doctors continue to perform tests and presribe drugs to an excess, and as long as we continue to defy nature's course by extending one's life beyond its natural limits, and as long as medical technological devices are created without determining the ability or the willingness of a patient to pay for the new device, and as long as we have people using our medical facilities for free, we will have high insurance rates. I do not have the answer as to what the future holds.