Quote:
Originally Posted by AmeliaG
Crockett and I super duper agree here.
Anything called reform should have addressed this.
If hospitals charged a normal markup, someone like your friend would have been able to just tighten his belt and sell a few toys to pay the bill for surgery, not be deterred and destroyed by the cost.
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The problem the govt is dealing with when it comes to any sort of meaningful reform is like I mentioned in the other topic in relation to insurance. The govt has to deal with the current market place.
Just like the govt wouldn't go in and nationalize the county's oil fields and refineries or set a maximum price on a gallon of gas, they can't exactly do that with the health sector or insurance either.
Countries that do those kinds of things are dictatorships in most cases. As a so called free society we have to work around various markets that have been created over time due to the status qua. We can't force private companies into that situation instantly. We have to slowly push them in that direction giving them time and ability to change their business models.
Sure it's would be more beneficial for the people to just turn everything into a free system single payer system where anyone could walk into any hospital or doctors office and get treatment doing away with massive bills that put people into bankruptcy and ending the useless leech system that is the health insurance market.
We simply can't do that as a free and open society.
IMO the current Obamacare set up is sort of a stop gap system that is necessary to deal with the insurance problem. It will eventually lead us to a single payer system IMO.
The hospital situation is another situation completely. Obama care wasn't a bill to reform the entire healthcare system, but rather to get people access to healthcare.
Expecting Obamacare to reform the entire system is asking too much of it from the start. It will help drive the costs down but separate or additional reform is needed in that area. A good start would be making a regulation that requires hospitals to show up front what they charge for procedures and make them justify charging people $50 for a aspirin and explain who that is not the same as say price gouging during a national disaster.