As an indication of how health care insurance works in the US, I will indicate who/what is involved in my (and my wife’s) insurance:
1) My previous employer (I am retired and have retiree benefits) Lockheed Martin which gives me and my wife each $900 towards our health care costs;
2) Medicare, towards whom I and my employer paid insurance premiums (which were erroneously called Taxes) for 30 years, and which now pays most of our medical costs;
3) Via Benefits (which used to be called One Exchange), a health care exchange hire by Lockheed Martin, which is NOT a health insurance provider, but acts as an agent, i. e., a go-between between beneficiaries and health insurance providers,
4) FlexPay, a company hired by Via Benefits, to take care of the actual heath cost payments (I think that they and Via Benefits are owned by the same holding company);
5) My actual health insurance company, which bills Medicare and Via Benefits for costs that they covered are paid by FlexPay;
6) My actual health care provider.
In my case, 5) and 6) are separate divisions of the same organization, Kaiser Permanente Health Services, but for most people, these are two separate corporate entities.
Some things to note about this list:
a) of the six organizations involved, only one, #6), actually has any doctors, medical equipment, hospital rooms, etc. to provide actual health care.
b) just one of these entities, #2), is a government organization. Medicare is, of course, part of Social Security, by far the worlds largest insurance company, and it was set up and is wholly owned and operated by the federal government. I. e., it is a socialist organization. (But then, 40% of the US is socialist.) The other 5 are profit making private capitalist organizations.
c) the Social Security Admin is headed up by Carolyn W. Colvin, who earns $179,700 a year for managing the worlds largest insurance company and over 65,000 employees. All the top executives of the other 5 companies have total compensations in the $Millions.
d) when Melania Trump, wife of the US president, required surgery for a kidney problem, the president, wishing only the best and safest medical care for his wife (I’m assuming) he sent her to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which is wholly owned and operated by the federal government. And all their doctors and staff are government employees whose paychecks are signed by the US treasurer. I. e., Donald Trump chooses socialized medicine for his family. This option is also available to all Senators and Congressmen and their families and is the option they usually choose, particularly the conservative Republican members.
e) If you take all the medical costs in the US and divide that amongst all US citizens - including even those that have no medical insurance and the estimated 45,000 who die annually for lack of adequate care - it comes out to over $10,000 per US citizen. The same costs for all the other leading market economies (the g20, for example) varies between $4,000 and $6,000. I. e., the US pays twice what everyone else in the developed world pays for health care. This comes out to well over $3Trillion per year.
But that is perfectly okay, because the US has by far the best health care system in the world. At least that’s what we are told by the representatives of the 5 non government companies I listed above and Republican politicians. But, the quality of a countries health care system is easy to measure because what we want from that system is very simple: a long and health life. I. e., we can look at the longevity, mortality, and morbidity statistics for those developed countries, statistics published annually by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the UN. What we find is that for the most developed countries life expectancy ranges from about 79 to 84 years. Japan is at the top at 83.7 years. Wow, look who’s last, in 43rd place at 78.9 years! Good old Let-The-Market-Set-The-Price U S of A! Not a big spread, but the US is certainly not at the top. The story is no different for morbidity and mortality rates. The US is at or near the bottom in almost every category.
To improve our health care system we don’t need to experiment or form committees to study the problem. We just need to see what those other countries are doing to get better and cheaper health care. I’ll let you, dear reader explore that one. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a few extra years of health life? And what could we do with that $1.5 Trillian? Some more aircraft carrier fleets; a few more stealth bombers; lots more tanks and missiles. Of course, if we had a progressive administration, they would just waste it on frivolous things like free college education for all or fixing the infrastructure mess.
Our health care system is so screwed up
because hospital costs are numbers just brewed up
numbers the insurance companies never question
they don’t care how much that gives us indigestion
and politicians don’t hear that we’re so pissed
‘cause they only listen to the lobbyists.
They know who’s paying the bill one way or another.
Yes , they know it’s going to be me or you brother.
Crap care for only twice the price.
Anywhere else that’s considered a vice.
But our health care costs are set by market forces,
giving us care not fit for pigs or horses.
And there will be no reform either simple or bold
because Americans believe everything we are told.
™ Version 4.2
