Health Care Costs - Why is it so high?

This election has brought a number of issues to the table but one in particular that is a concern for many Americans is the rising cost of health care. Obama, Hillary and even McCain want to get government involved in some form of other, not that is bad, just that we need to be cautious as to what kind of involvement.

Obama’s plan has some good points regarding reduction of cost, including electronic records keeping, and is the most detailed plan I have seen from the three candidates. Although not the same as the Canadian or U.K. socialist health care it would be another Washington run bureaucracy, destined to cost more to run than what it would save on the other end.

Hillary actually has a rather interesting plan, at least at face value, she plans of providing tax cuts to all those that have health care insurance and opening up the same insurance programs, until now only available to members of Congress to the general public. The problem with her plan is that it doesn’t get to the root of the problem and that is, why is the cost so high to begin with, again a band-aid on a wound that needs to be sutured.

McCain’s plan is strikingly similar to Hillary’s plan however he has added a little more meat and potatoes to his plan by supporting tort reform to help lower the cost of health care and modernization of records systems. This is a good start, but not the entire picture of WHY our costs are through the roof.

The knee jerk attitude of many is to blame the insurance companies. Believe me when I say I have no love for insurance companies, but they are NOT the prime cause for the escalating costs, but merely a secondary symptom of what is truly ailing the countries health care system. Much like the oil companies being blamed for the increase in fuel costs the insurance companies are being made the fall guy for the problems with health care.

Malpractice suits have been another knee jerk answer for the increasing health care costs but in truth the cost of medical insurance for doctors to protect themselves from malpractice is less that 1% of the current costs. However it does play a role in other respects that I will discuss later in this article.

So what are the real causes you ask? There is no simple answer to the problem, no silver bullet to kill the inflationary monster of health care, but a series of issues some of which we ourselves are to blame.

The major reason for increase in these costs is something many of us would not expect or even think of, and that is TOO MUCH health care. We have become a nation of hypochondriacs in many ways, we go to the doctor or hospital for ailments that we think we may have because of some ad or some documentary we saw on TV last night.

To further exacerbate the issue doctors are ordering tests and medications that are unnecessary and/or even harmful and causing other illness. It is not because doctors are trying to milk the patient for more money, because in most cases the doctor receives no moneys for these tests. So why do they do it? Simply because of the aforementioned issue about malpractice suits. In order to avoid these suits doctors are doing more tests and issuing more medications in the belief that if it APPEARS that they are doing all they can the patient will be less likely to sue.

There are some doctors however that DO over proscribe medications for personal gain, fortunately not many, but enough to cause concern. The era of “specialization” has also been a factor in that these doctors are paid by the case, furthering the number of surgeries and or procedures that may not be always necessary. Again I want to stress here that this is but a fraction of the doctors in this country, but still a concern and an expense in both dollars and lives in some cases.

There are some other issues that are causing these increases, some recognizable and some not so apparent. One of those less apparent is the cost of records keeping. The vast majority of hospitals have not switched to electronic records keeping and this slows the process down to be able to access and transfer patient data. Medications and previous test results as well as patient histories are being lost or to slow to arrive, once again costing us millions of dollars in proper medical care.

Pharmaceutical companies are also to blame. Their advertising has people running to their doctors for the latest magic bullet remedy. Add to this the control U.S. pharmaceutical companies have on the FDA and Congress. They have effectively stopped the import of many drugs from competing companies from other nations giving them a virtual monopoly on the industry. They have also hidden the fact that many of the drugs we take for one ailment of another are no better than some of grandma’s remedies.

Holistic medicines and health care are equally being sloughed off as “witch doctor” treatments. One example is the thousands of cases of chronic back pain. Today’s practitioners of medicine arbitrarily recommend spinal fusion, yet there has been no independent testing done to prove that this procedure actually works. Another example is carpel tunnel syndrome which medical doctors recommend surgery as the only answer. Both of these conditions I have personally seen and experienced being corrected by chiropractic and until fairly recent this form of treatment wasn’t even covered by most insurance companies.

I’m sure that there may be other factors involved like the illegal alien use of hospitals and never paying, and although part of the problem, I feel that it is one that we may not see an end to, due to the fact that none of the mainstream candidates nor enough in Congress want to stop this particular problem, it would be best that we focus on the main issues that I have mentioned above.

So how do we fix these problems?

1. Tort reform to lessen the inclination for doctors to over proscribe, as well as cut the cost of malpractice insurance.
2. Require all hospitals, clinics and private practice doctors to maintain electronic records keeping in order to facilitate less costly and quicker more accurate records keeping.
3. Open up our borders to allow foreign drug companies to compete in this market. This will not only lower prices due to competition but also possibly open up new remedies that previously have not been allowed in this country.
4. Tied into this is to restrict the pharmaceutical companies regarding their involvement with the FDA and AMA.
5. Disallow medical practitioners from owning stock in pharmaceutical companies. This removes any possible complicity on the part of doctors to proscribe needless drugs.
6. Restrict Doctors from being paid by the case and instead provide a salary a couple of the more prestigious hospitals are now doing.
7. And finally as with any issue research and education for the public and the medical industry on alternative remedies and cures.