{"id":495,"date":"2006-01-12T19:38:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-12T19:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2006\/01\/12\/495\/"},"modified":"2006-01-12T19:38:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-12T19:38:00","slug":"495","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=495","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Republican politicians love to talk about what a wonderful and miraculous health care system<\/span> we have here in the USA. And in a lot of ways, that is true. But in a lot of ways it’s not. First of all, access to the miracle of modern medicine in America is certainly very unequal. There’s that huge chunk of the population without health insurance (around 16%). Yes, there’s still Medicare and Medicaid assistance available, but the Republicans are cutting it way back so as to pay for war, tax cuts, and damage from hurricanes that have become very destructive because of pollution from SUVs and coal power plants (more long-time GOP favorites). <\/p>\n

But there’s another thing about the American health care system that irks me. It’s extremely biased against education and prevention. Doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies love to do thing for you when you’re sick, but they don’t seem very interested in preventing you from getting sick. This is not too surprising; not too many big businesses (and that’s what medicine in America is) will voluntarily attempt to shrink the demand for its product. Businesses generally act to increase demand, rationally or more often, irrationally. And that’s just what appears to be happening among all the players in the modern health care system.<\/p>\n

Case in point — the NY Times is currently running a series on the effects of diabetes in the New York area. As in the rest of the nation, people are becoming more and more obese in this region, and that is causing more and more diabetes. But diabetes is a slow disease; it usually gives you a chance to change your ways so as to keep it in control and possibly avoid the nasty side-effects like amputation and blindness and heart disease. A number of hospitals in the region realize that, and tried to open “disease management” centers for diabetics, i.e. programs that focus on education and better living habits (most significantly, more exercise and weight loss). But most of those centers have closed, despite the encouraging results they were getting with their patients. Why? Because the insurance companies were hardly interested in paying for their services, even though they could clearly lower future claim costs due to better health. <\/p>\n

The article spells out some rather shocking facts. Insurance companies will pay $30,000 for a foot amputation, but will deny a $150 claim for a podiatrist to help a diabetic avoid foot problems. They will deny an occasional $75 session with a nutritionist for advice on diet, but have no trouble with on-going $350 payments for dialysis. Actually, they would rather not pay anything at all for diabetics; they would rather discourage diabetics from doing business with them. So, they don’t offer “nice services” like foot care and nutrition counseling, for fear of attracting diabetics as customers. So the population gets sicker, health care costs shoot way up (as patients are provided with expensive, high-tech treatments for serious medical conditions that could have been prevented or delayed), and yet the capitalist owners of health care companies get richer. Yes, folks, this is the miracle of American medicine — wait until you get really sick, and then stuff you with complicated chemicals and wire you to robot devices so as to keep you going; alive but not really well. But that’s only IF you have insurance. Otherwise . . . . . it might as well be the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

I studied microeconomics in grad school, and I was certainly bedazzled by the “magic of the market” after the careful exposition the professor gave of efficiencies and rational allocation effects of a competitive economy. But we were also taught that “there are certain exceptions, and the results aren’t necessarily fair”. And the older I get, the more I see of those exceptions and that unfairness. Yes, I realize that socialist medicine is a non-starter. But capitalist medicine ultimately hurts the social corpus. Just as our founding fathers realized that we need mixed government (taking a cue from Aristotle, who said long ago that total monarchy is bad and total democracy is bad, whereas the truth lies in the middle), we need to realize that our nation needs a mixed economy. Over the past 25 years, America has wandered further and further from that ideal (during which time a lot of people have gotten very rich, but many, many more have become quite poor). I hope the pendulum might yet turn.<\/p>\n

But for now, a lot of Americans are diabetic or are becoming diabetic, and the health care system that they rely on is certainly a very imperfect and often unfair one, not to mention irrational. Check out the article<\/a> if you need some proof. And keep exercising and watch your weight!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Republican politicians love to talk about what a wonderful and miraculous health care system we have here in the USA. And in a lot of ways, that is true. But in a lot of ways it’s not. First of all, access to the miracle of modern medicine in America is certainly very unequal. There’s that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}