The Cost of Health Care

Listening to all of the candidates and all of the pundits I keep hearing the same message regarding insurance and health care. They say they will find a way for us to afford health care, or they will find a way for us to get insurance for health care.

Nobody is asking the questions: "Why is health care so expensive?" or "Why should we need insurance to pay for health care?"

If you're going to want health care in the U.S. why get insurance? Why not just get a loan and buy an extra house or plot of land to invest in for the sole purpose of selling it if you need to pay medical bills?

What? They won't let you do that? Do they make you throw your money down a bottomless pit each month, forcing you to gamble on a chance that you will get sick? There's a fifty-fifty chance that you won't be covered anyway.

The real candidates for public office will have to guts to say "We are going after the Medical Industrial Complex." Everyone else is bogus.

We need congressional hearings about medical costs and those costs need to be justified. Everyone seems to be too terrified to confront this issue, or they are in the pockets of the big drug companies. Health care is not supposed to be part of capitalism.

There is a parallel between politics and medicine. In politics, the public elects candidates who are good at getting themselves elected, but consistently fail at doing the job for which they were elected. In medicine. The money and prestige appears to be the primary motivation behind the pursuit of such careers, overriding the intrinsic benefit of scientific inquiry and maintaining a healthy community.

Hospitals and clinics are absorbed into the fold of giant corporations. Urgent care clinics have the same atmosphere as auto repair shops. Instead of posters advertising tires and shock absorbers, these clinics have posters advertising pharmaceuticals.

The term "doctor" is no longer used in most documentation anymore. Now it's "health care provider" because for liability reasons, you may not see an actual doctor until it's almost too late.

Hospitals and clinics fail when they don't have patients. When people are healthy, pharmaceutical manufacturers lose on Wall Street.

In the end, the societal models in Dietrich Dorner's book "The Logic of Failure" indicate that universal health care might result in overpopulation, perhaps of the "wrong" kind.