2006 Soap Box Archives

Crossroads Part Nine

Medical Morass

If anybody loves American products it's me and that includes American made automobiles and I happen to own three of them.

I buy American by choice and support American workers to the hilt.

But the other day I heard some car manufacturers saying that the government had to take the health insurance load off the shoulders of corporate America, which means that the citizens of this country should pay for the bad business decisions the carmakers made during the years when they had a corner on the domestic market.

What they are suggesting is called socialized medicine and if you think
health care is a mess now just let the government create another bureaucracy to deal with it. They can't even handle Medicare, much less supply health insurance for every worker in the country.

It would be a nightmare beyond imagining. The paper work alone would create a quagmire and trying to schedule a doctor's appointment would be like trying to thread a piece of cable through the eye of a needle.

Just take a look at your income tax return and imagine a medical form
created by the Feds. It would take a battery of Philadelphia
lawyers a week to get through it.

Greedy doctors have exploited the Medicare system every since its inception. They cheat the system out of billions of dollars. And they are not cheating the government, they are cheating the people who depend on the program for health care.

In my opinion when a doctor is proven to be cheating the Medicare program he should have his license to practice medicine in any state revoked
permanently, yet I guess my opinion is not shared by the American Medical
Association.

Every year the insurance company who we use for our employees health
coverage keeps raising the price by thousands of dollars. And it's happening
in every business that gives benefits to its employees. Money I would love
to give my employees has to be given to our health care supplier.

You could buy stock in a drug company for what a hospital charges you for
one aspirin and the drugs with the astronomical costs can be bought in
Canada for a fraction of the price.

I have nothing against pharmaceutical companies making money. After all they spend billions researching and developing the drugs that keep us healthy. But they also spend millions lobbying the powers that be in Washington to approve drugs that have not been clinically tested long enough to determine their long-term effect on the people who will be taking them. This has produced some disastrous results and when you knowingly hurt people just to make money it's hard to feel sorry for you.

There are people in this nation who are no longer able to pay the
skyrocketing cost of health insurance and have lost it at the time when they
need it the most.

So what is the solution and where does it stop and what do we do?

I don't claim to have the answers but I do have some suggestions.

First of all, the American Medical Association should purge their ranks of
dishonest doctors who cheat the government and private insurance companies which add to the cost we all pay for coverage.

And while they're at it they should also do something about the inept doctors who lose their license in one state and simply move to another
one and set up their practices again.

One of the best ways to reduce the cost of health coverage is tort reform.
If someone is truly injured by a medical treatment they certainly have a
right to be compensated. But all too often the lawyer who files the lawsuit ends up with most of the money.

And the insurance companies just keep raising the cost of malpractice
insurance and doctors have no option but to pass it on to their patients.

The hospital business for the most part has been taken over by the
profit-motivated private sector. And I have no problem with that. But when
hospital corporations offer doctors incentives to bring well insured, paying
patients to their hospitals and to take those with less ability to pay to
non-corporate hospitals you can easily see the result.

The corporate hospitals just get richer and charge more and the
non-corporate ones get poorer and also have to charge more to make up for the shortfall.

There is however islands of hope in this bleak landscape and among them, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee, a name we're all familiar with.

Their policy is that if a family has resources or insurance to cover the
treatment they have to pay, but no child is turned away because of a
family's inability to pay.

And the cutting edge research done by the brilliant staff there is
immediately shared with the medical world at large as soon as it is
clinically proven, not becoming the exclusive property of a large
pharmaceutical company to charge whatever they want to for the resulting
drugs.

It takes a lot of effort by a lot of dedicated people to keep the doors at
St. Jude open but the point is it can be done and should be encouraged and
supported by all of us concerned about health care.

In all fairness lawyers and doctors are not the only ones who work the
system. Some private citizens are also guilty.

Recently a large retail chain has started offering generic drugs for a
fraction of what main line drug stores charge. I think this approach could
create competition and put some pressure on the price of drugs. Hopefully
even start a trend.

Finally, though I am vehemently opposed to socialized medicine I think the government should double their efforts to provide a safety net for those who truly have nowhere else to turn.

The new Congress will probably deal with this in the coming year. I only
hope they'll do something meaningful, not something that will add more bureaucratic glue to an already sticky situation.

Pray for our troops.

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

 

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