Healthy Mae and Pharma Mac
by drinker on Mar.25, 2009, under Conspiracy Theories, Politics
With all the discussions about the changes to the healthcare industry in the United States I figured I should put my two cents in. Not to mention with the way the dollars been going you’re better off using your pennies as projectiles thrown at the car in front of you that is too slow at the green light, then using them to actually purchase something. Back to the point, which is how I see the new healthcare system shaping up.
First and foremost I do not believe the private system is going anywhere. Simply put there is far too much money in it. In addition don’t forget that everyone with socialized medicine needs the USA’s private system for when things need to get done and it’s not an emergency situation. Given that we are not going to get rid of the private system lets discuss the options. The private system is there to make money. Never forget that one fact. The private insurance industry tries to insure people that it thinks will not cost them more then the premiums the people pay. When someone has obvious aliments that will cost the insurance company more money than they can make in premiums it will not insure the person. It is simply bad business. I don’t blame them per say given that they are in the business to make money.
If a strictly government run system were to replace the current hodgepodge of private and public insurance with a strict government only system it will be a disaster. The reason being is that the government run system will not start to fail till long after it was too late. It will fail for the same reasons the rest of the government programs in this country eventually fail. It will be run into the ground by a series of political appointees, unions, lobbyists and lawyers. It will start off all well and good but in ten years it will start to show its strain.
Where does that leave us? How can the two systems be combined to satisfy everyone? Or at least long enough to function till artificial intelligences takes over our decision making for us all ( I for one welcome our future robot masters and hope they enjoy my sarcastic humor). I am usually a very pro-business kind of person and I am still pro-business when it comes to the healthcare industry, but something has to be done about the coverage given to high risk and those with prior conditions. Those with high-risk conditions and/or prior conditions are almost impossible to insure and still be profitable. The price to be paid would simply be too high for the person to pay. What if the government plan would take care of this high risk pool?
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the end result system will be something similar to the mortgage industry. Purely private companies will handle the gravy of the healthcare industry. This means that the industry will cover those they think will not actually need the healthcare. After all they are betting that you will use less healthcare resources then you pay for each year. The government program will then take care of the high risk people or at least handle the high risk portion of their care.
The system will be able to leverage the existing infrastructure and allow for most the private insurance companies to slowly fade out of existence over the next twenty or so years. This will primarily happen as each election will bring in a new politician who will promise to have the government funded system take on more and more of what was provided by the private companies. The private insurance companies will react as most private business react, they will allow the government to keep nibbling at the services they offer, till one day before they know it, the private companies will have no use.
I have one other way that this will go down too. This is the more cynical approach but given the intelligence of those running the whole darn thing it seems just as likely to happen. The politicians will create the healthy mae and pharma mac (HMPM) almost private not quite public either corporation. But unlike the above mentioned scenario, HMPM will not be a retail service. They instead will be a sort of re-insurer. They will be the dump where the private insurance companies put the people they cannot make any money from. In the first go round the system will work very well as common sense rules will apply. HMPM will evaluate the people and do the right thing by taking only calculated risks. But soon the pseudo private nature of the company will come through.
HMPM will have their CEOs make their bonuses not on the smart decision making of their auditors, the bonuses will be based on just how many people they “insure”. The politicians will be paid a portion of the bonuses via campaign donations till soon every basket case the private insurance can find will be on the HMPM roles. They will agree to insure them with sole express knowledge that they will dish the person off on HMPM. We all see where this going right? The private companies will just dump and dump and dump till it all just collapses. This should be just about in time for me to retire.
This system should last long enough for either me to die or for our computers to treat like little pets. Personally they way my dog spends her days are pretty damn good. Sit down, lift a paw and get a treat. I might even be able to do better than that. With all this crap going on, smoking seems like a pretty good habit to pickup. It could solve the social security problem.
