D
davidmlamb
Guest
So a person develops colon cancer should just be able to aford to pay this out of pocket by negotiating the price? My step father was a diabetic which caused his heart to deterioirate. He had to have 5 bypasses. The entire cost of the medical involved was 135,000 dollars and this was 1993! My parents had not even saved that much money in the 22 years they had been married at the time (my step father was a truck driver and my mother a cook).Health care has become so expensive, BECAUSE of government intervention and regulation. Where did HMOs come from? Or employer provided health insurance? They came about because of government intervention. Government created the problems we currently have and now government wants to be the “cure” for the disease it created.
“Health insurance” as an entire concept is deeply flawed. Insurance is for things that are unlikely to happen but would be extremely damaging if they did- getting in a car crash, dying of an accident at an early age and leaving a widow and orphans, your house burning down.
Getting a checkup isn’t unexpected. Getting sick isn’t unexpected. They are common. For any insurance to cover things that happen ALL THE TIME TO PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE, it nescessarily has to be very expensive.
The answer is to go back to an extremely simple concept. The patient pays the doctor. It’s so simple. Both parties negotiate a fair price and the patient gets better care.
So your premise that people should just be able to pay for this stuff out of pocket by negotiating the price is perposterous. Health care did not get this expensive because of government regulations. It became this expensive because the health care industry itself has has become very complex and very advanced, and the complexities and medical advances are astronaumically expensive. Can we negotiate the prices of interstate highways, bridges and transportation systems in order to avoid paying for them publicly?
The prices of goods and services can be negotiated to a small degree but your argument is equivelent to saying that a 500,000 dollar home can be negotiated down to 25,000 dollars. Maybe negotiated down as low as 375,000 dollars if we are lucky but not 25,000 dollars. A 135,000 dollar surgery and hospital stay may be negotiated down to 80,000 dollars but how many people can come up with that kind of money or even make payments on that kind of money when they are struggling to make ends meet?
When cost get this high then we pull together as a sociey and pay for them publicly so that they become accessable to everyone. This is called “social justice” and it provides liberty for everyone. The Church teaches us that the right of private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good." When “private gain and basic community needs conflict with one another,” it is for the public authorities “to seek a solution to these questions, with the active involvement of individual citizens and social groups.”
Peace,
David