Quote:
Originally Posted by zimmy
"Although an individual is 50 percent more likely to have a car accident in a year than to be hospitalized, the average bill for a hospitalization is over two and a half times higher than the average loss for a car accident. And, while the bill for a single hospitalization is about the same as the loss from an average house fire, a person is ten times more likely to be hospitalized than to experience a house fire."
"On average, uninsured families can only afford to pay in full for about 12% of the admissions to hospital (hospitalizations) they might experience. Even uninsured families with incomes above 400% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) can afford to pay in full for only 37% of their hospitalizations. "
The Value of Health Insurance:#^& Few of the Uninsured Have Adequate Resources to Pay Potential Hospital Bills |
Your article does not go into the reasons for the high costs, especially the most fundamental reasons. If most do not have sufficient assets to pay for a single hospitalization, how could the hospitals afford to stay in business? Big pockets of insurance or government are motives to raise prices to levels single payers cannot afford. Simply mandating that everyone is insured does nothing to relieve us of the higher costs, but may actually fuel the rise in prices and destroys one of the reasons to buy insurance--to have an advantage over those uninsured.
If most people were not "insured," would hospital costs be so high that they could not afford to access medical care? Or would innovative entrepeneurs seize the opportunity to tap the available market of that majority "uninsured" to provide "affordable" health care? And this applies to the entire "economy"--the competitive free market versus the planned, mandated, gvt. intruded market. The high and rising costs of life have much to do with gvt. regs, mandates, and redistribution, with market forces adjusting, thereby constantly inflating the price of life, but leaving the lower end of "earners" further behind as their power to adjust is weak, thus leading to more gvt. intrusion, and further rising costs and market adjustments, and a greater expansion of the number of those on the lower end and the ensuing greater need for government intrusion and redistribution.
I know it sounds brutal, but more free market and less government "works" better in keeping life "affordable" to a greater number of people. And the greater the government intrusion and regulation of prices and distribution, the larger the number of comparatively "poor" who depend on the government largesse and regulation and the greater the need for the unending cycle of government expansion--which can only lead to collapse or some form of dictatorship.
If, under the current cycle (in which charities actually pay for 80% of the costs "passed on" to others for the medical care of the uninsured) we insist that the uninsured pay for their care out of pocket or, as your article notes, "take out further loans, or sell their house or other non-financial assets to pay some of these costs," would that not motivate those, who are able, to buy insurance? And, if we just can't stand the idea of charities paying most of the cost of the rest, how about some gvt. programs (preferrably States) to pay for them rather than destroying the Constitution?