A BUSY SUBJECT!

(Lansing State Journal, National Conferences of State Legislature, Bloomberg)

(Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Huff Post, Frazer Chronicle)

 

It’s almost funny how our media approaches, dissects, and reports the news that we are able to obtain from our favorite news-stand, or at the 6:00 P.M. news, or listen to during our daily travels. It seems today that the reporting of news is…..like dominos all in a line, and one hitting the other as they began to make their predictable fall away from the initial contact.

 

In many cases, the mainstream media will attack (a person, place or thing) prompting either a city, state or federal government to examine, with much aplomb, a situation that everybody knows about but those people who should know.

 

I call it a busy subject, it’s when legislators seem to discover, quite by accident, indiscretions perpetrated against the general public or even better, an act against a certain portion of the voting public. The activity goes way beyond the old Capitol Hill two step, legislators will jump on the bandwagon, (usually on the front seat), and decry the act as diabolical, make a few speeches, wring their hands a few times, take part in photo ops and move on to the next busy subject!

 

Left in the wake is the decades old results…..nothing gets done, the wrong isn’t righted, and after a time, usually a short time, things revert to the status quo, and little more than a ripple on the water has been raised.

 

The newest busy subject is the disparity between hospitals and what is charged for the same medical procedure. I speak from experience when I say that people who go to a hospital for treatment do not need to worry about the cost of a procedure. Without exception, any person entering a medical facility where surgeries are preformed needs all the reassurance possible.

 

Sure, many medical procedures that are administered in clinics, or hospitals are what would be termed routine, mundane, or run of the mill garden type events, but…..I recall a professional football player that went into a Kansas City hospital twenty years ago for a routine knee scoop and was carted out in a coffin, he had died on the operating table.

 

This guy was in peak physical health, 6’-3” tall, 235 pounds of muscle and, as I recall, less than 30 years old, yet, he died from some sort of complications from a simple knee operation. People know that every time they go under the knife, or are anesthetized, there is a potential for bad things to happen.

 

NO INSURANCE, NO PROBLEM

There used to be some colonial law that was brought across the sea from England that was in place from the beginning of the colonization on the east coast and the Virginias of America. Doctors who back more than 500 years practiced doctoring in a vastly different way only charged what his patient could afford. This practice was followed for years and years until it kind of became the unwritten law of the land.

 

The first insurance offered in the United States for injury was issued by the Franklin Health Assurance Company of Massachusetts in 1850, and covered injuries suffered by railroad and steamboat workers. There were experiments with sickness insurance but it was 1890 before actual sickness and health insurance was offered.

 

The first employer-sponsored group disability was issued in 1911, but the plans primary purpose was to replace wages lost due to inability to work, not medical expenses. Before the development of medical expense insurance, people were expected to pay out of pocket for all medical procedures, a fee for services business model.

 

It would take until the 1930’s and the Blue Cross organization to take over where hospitals left off with their business procedures. Blue Cross offered a pre-pay plan of coverage based on what hospitals had been doing for most of the early 20^th century. The first employee-sponsored hospitalization plan was created by Dallas, Texas, teachers in 1929. The plan covered teachers who went to a single hospital, and was the forerunner of today’s HMO’s.

 

I was usually covered by my wife’s employer, so I never had to worry…..another reason we’re still married, but since both are retirements, the coverage, and wording is a bit complicated, and can be hard to understand. It shouldn’t be that way, as you get older, things should become easier and clearer to use and understand, life is funny huh.

 

My wife has, over the past several years, had two medical procedures that cost over a quarter million dollars. She had hearing devices implanted in her skull above both ears, and with the aid of her external receiver can hear probably at about a 60% rate of what she used to hear. Without the external receivers she is totally deaf.

 

But the $250,000 procedure was all outpatient, very little in hospital treatment, so between the devices, the doctor’s charge, and the operating room and hospital costs…..a quarter of a million bucks was spent by my wife’s insurance.

 

My wife has an autoimmune malady that will slowly affect much of her body, so there is further medical procedures that will undoubtedly be necessary. My wife goes to the doctor every six months as do I, and every time we walk through the clinic door a nice, but firm receptionist greets us with a smile, (I attend her appointments because she has a hard time hearing), and she asks for our insurance card.

 

After this procedure, she cheerfully tells us to take a seat and wait for the nurse to come and get us. I’ve watched people coming into the clinic as we sit waiting, and those without insurance are treated differently than those of us with insurance.

 

It may be a difficult truth to accept in today’s society, but if you do not have the proper protection, your chances of credible efficient health care go down exponentially. Now right here I would like to let you know that hospitals are a business, and as such need to at least break even. I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin; where there are three hospitals to take care of the medical needs of the 103,000 people that call the city home.

 

People die here every day, people are kicked out into the street after minimal health treatment, and others neglect treatment or medication because they don’t have proper coverage, or the money. This happens in little old Green Bay, I can’t imagine what goes on in Milwaukee, or New York, or Los Angeles.

 

THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR YEARS

For the media or our legislature to suddenly get all het-up about the mess that our health industry is, typical, at least to me. My sister is a diabetic, has been for several years…..and she can’t afford her medication…..so she cuts her insulin in half, instead of 4 a day, she takes 2, that ain’t right.

 

My mother, (she died in 2001) was a diabetic, had a bad heart, and a host of other health problems, but she was lucky, she was a member of the Michigan Teachers Association Blue Cross-Blue Shield health plan and everything was paid 100%. She was lucky, she actually beat the system, between her medication, doctors office calls and hospitalizations, that little old lady cost Blue Cross-Blue Shield millions…..and today, I assume other insurees are still paying.

 

I remember back in the 1970’s when I was having tooth problems, I went to our dentist for what I thought would be a simple extraction…..man was I wrong, before I got out of that infernal chair he wanted to sock me for $5000.

 

There were root cannels, spikes, bridges, and several extractions; I remember it like it was yesterday, I like to be in control of my emotions, you know, like nothing throws me, I roll with the punches and that kind of a thing. But this dentist really knocked my proverbial sox off when he said the procedure would cost around $500, or so I thought. I repeated his figure and said, “Oh that’s not bad, $500 for all that work.” You can imagine my reaction when he said, “oh no, it’ll be around $5000…..needless to say, the work didn’t get done right then.

 

I guess you could say that doctor’s gouge, hospitals gouge, and insurance gouge, hell even my dog’s vet sticks it to me. But when my sister can’t afford her proper medication, and when close to 50 million Americas are uninsured, when an elected official approaches health insurance, and health provider questions like it was the first that they’d heard about it, umm mamma, we might need to take a closer look at how competent these people really are.

 

THE FREE MARKET APPROACH

I know, I know, supply and demand, it’s the attitude that has made America…..well, a whole bunch of different things, but the one thing that people don’t want to talk about is how detached we all seem to be, one from the other. If people without insurance use the hospital emergency room like it were a doctor call, we all pick up the tab.

 

If people don’t take their proper medication we all pay, if people do not get proper medical care, treatment and monitoring…..bingo, we all pay. To a degree it’s why there are drastically different hospital charges for the same procedure, these institutions of health care gotta make it up somehow.

 

However, that said there is only so much that the rest of us either can pay, or our willing to pay, I mean your mother carried you for 9 months, exactly how long are we expected to carry you? I’m not gonna get into Obama-care, or universal health care. The arguments for either is simply way to silly and uneducated for me to get involved with, why waste all that energy when people already got their minds made up on basically faulty information…..and I’m talking about both sides!

 

The days of doctors driving around in their Cadillac’s, and taking months of leisure and lazy vacations is coming to an end. The days of insurance’s high ranking officials driving around in their Lamborghini with a blond on each arm will also end…..both know it, and are acting accordingly, they are grabbing every penny that they possibly can.

 

You could almost call this era the era of the busy subject one group wants to make green-backs, and the other, political hay, its funny how things turn out…..sometimes!

 

HAVE A NICE DAY!