Quote:
Originally Posted by BadBoyBenny
If we're going to complain about dentists then it really needs to be the entire medical industry in the US.
Hospitals charging more than $100 to administer ibuprofen, $2000 to ride 5 miles in an ambulance driven by a guy who makes $15 an hour. Either they're all scamming us in some way or another, or it's just the way it is.
If you dislike this system, you should definitely identify all the proper solutions and push for them at the ballot box. Because the system is complicated and there's no decent solution that will fit on a bumper sticker, neither Democratic solutions like "Medicare for All" nor Republican solutions like "Nobody thought healthcare could be so complicated. *shrug*"
The reality is that the exorbitant prices are a form of price discrimination. They will list $1,000 as the list price for a treatment, to catch those rich but uninsured people. They'll offer whatever discounts to the non-rich so they maximize their take (so if they think you can only pay $100, they'll eventually settle/write off 90% of the face value of your bill). They'll get stiffed by a certain number of people and they'll still treat the uninsured, and those costs get passed on to the people who do pay. Insurance companies will negotiate a "discount" as well and they price point will reflect their costs and payer pools.
It was Ronald Reagan who decided that poor people dying outside the ER was a dick move, so unless we consciously decide to go back to the days where they would check your wallet as you lay bleeding, any sort of rational proposal has to include some form of insured covering the uninsured.
People are poor savers and living longer, so healthcare spending overall is skyrocketing under any scenario (the recent price tag fiasco for Medicare For All shows just how ignorant people are of this problem - people were kicking and hollering about the $30 trillion price tag until they realized that under the current system that's actually less than what we're expecting to pay). Any health care plan is going to have to include the problem of making people healthier now so that they're not an expensive medical disaster in 30 years.
I think very few people are actually scamming the system. But the problem is caused by the intersection of greed and stupidity and ignorance. And the accusations that there is a simple fix just detract from the reality that this is a rat king sized problem with pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, lawyers, politicians, and human nature all knotted together.