Posted by
Roxanna M. on Monday, March 03, 2008 3:46:43 PM
A few years back I remember reading about a health care facility that was having to contact it's current and former patients to advise them that they might have contracted hepatitis. How? It seems that the medical personnel were not sterilizing the colonoscopy instrument between patients.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Now, comes word that a clinic in Vegas is being shut down over hepatitis concerns. Seems that the medical personnel were reusing syringes and vials of medication. Got to save money, you know. Hepatitis could be the least of these people's concerns. What about HIV/AIDS?
The dirty little secret that nobody's telling us, though, is that making people sicker is the best and most efficient way to make more money. If I go into the hospital for come-and-go surgery, the hospital makes a certain amount of money. If I get an infection, especially a bad one, however, then I've got to stay longer and the hospital can bill the insurance company for more money. Give people hepatitis, and they've got to seek treatment, maybe for the rest of their lives. What a bonanza!
Get people on medication and keep them hooked on it, and they'll be coming to you until they croak. My gosh, have you ever seen such easy money!
Here's the bottom line: There's no money in good health, and the medical profession has no interest whatsoever in keeping you in good health. Their only interest is in making sure that you come and see them as often as you can.
For this reason, paying for health care will soon be out of reach for the average citizen of this country. Business will not be able to continue shouldering all or most of the load. People paying for their own insurance will cease to exist because there comes a time when you just have to say that you can't do it anymore. If it's a choice between the house payment and the medical insurance payment, medical insurance is going to lose every time.
Insurance companies are completely dependent on premiums. If everyone stopped paying premiums, they would be broke and out of business. You would think, wouldn't you, that they would start be nicer to us. That is not the case however. It seems that common sense in the insurance industry is nonexistent. Instead of making insurance affordable, so that more people would buy it, they just keep making it more and more unaffordable and blaming everyone but themselves.
Here's another dirty little secret: America already has socialized medicine. It's being run by the insurance industry. Treatment is being rationed. Medicine is being rationed. As is apparent from the above examples, there is nothing that is not being rationed.
We're paying more and more and getting less and less. That clinic in Vegas should be shut down and all medical personnel - doctors right through nurses - should be stripped of their licenses to dispense health care. The directors of the clinic should be forbidden from just going somewhere else and opening a new one.
Private insurance should follow the example of Medicare: the facility cannot bill Medicare for its own negligence. In other words, if the hospital gives me an infection, the hospital cannot bill Medicare for treating that infection. Instead of the sky being the limit, the negligent facilities are going to have to eat the costs all on their own. When and if that becomes the standard throughout this country, the cost of health care will go down, as will incidences of medical malpractice.
We tend to be a little more careful about the spending of money when it comes from our own pocket.