Profits, Frauds And Insurance Premiums
In the West, there is a widespread consensus that costs of living and social status always mirror one another. The more one can afford the wealthier one is. If this adage is no longer true, maybe was it never true at all. Many among the middle class, who still can purchase some form of healthcare insurance, have realized that their security hangs by a thread. Each year health insurance premiums are set to further skyrocket. The average employee receiving benefits through an employer doesn’t feel safer either as the out of pocket (before the insurance kicks in) ever increases. The out of pocket for a minimum coverage varying between 5,000 dollars and 2,500 respectively.
If getting health insurance through the employer is a big plus, a 2,500 dollar expense for family of four still represents financial stress. In 2013, a CNN analysis estimated that 76% of Americans were living from pay check to pay check. Considering that the average household has a mere thousand dollars in savings and credit cards close to being maxed out, financial flexibility has become elusive.
Overbilling Is Only A Fraud Among ‘Many’ Others
Although many have access to programs such as medicare, the latter are such in deep red ink. Medicare liabilities amount to $30 trillion. Obamacare did more harm than good. Though realistically speaking, the Trump administration won’t be able to fix anything. Such programs have been the main drive behind healthcare costs and insurance premium increase for many decades. They have fueled the dynamics of demand and supply and reversing the trends is practically impossible. Any new policy attempting to lower the costs in favor of the patients will send the healthcare industry into a tailspin.
Many hospitals and medical professionals have overbilled insurances for quite some time now. The whole industry is inflationary. So on one end, we find that bad health is often linked to bad eating habits, a stained food chain and various chemical invasions; and on the other end, we have a sector profiting from sickness as if there were no tomorrows. One doesn’t need to be a PhD – nor a prophet – to predict how this will end.
There have many articles lauding the efficiency and affordability of the Swiss healthcare system. Though even Switzerland has a massive pension fund headache to resolve within 4 years from now. The country could just go under if nothing is done, contended a Financial Times article in 2010. Aging population is a dire problem because the birth rate in the West went drastically down compared to 70 years ago. Financial projections were based on 3 or 4 kids per household. Today the birth rate is about 1.2 or three times less. It is not just Switzerland but the entire West that should be extremely concerned.
Major Economies As Health Hazards.
America and Europe being major economies, money printing to delay the day of reckoning remains a solution. The Federal Reserve has already done that several times since the 2008 crisis. Unfortunately, the price tag has still yet to come. Switzerland and ECB will also have to resort to the printing press. However, we can always cynically speculate on a war causing mass casualties to fix this mathematical equation. While this really sounds like an absolute worse case scenario, world tensions are rising. Something is definitely brewing.
The majority assumes that assessing the quality of healthcare systems is a tricky business. That all methods and prognostics have their own flaws. Well, if one is going to monetize the ‘gift of life‘, there are more incentives to profit from diseases to start with. On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.K seems to have the worst healthcare system by far. The latter could collapse at any moment as over 3 million people are on the NHS waiting list. According to the telegraph.uk, hundreds unnecessarily died between 2006 and 2009 waiting to see a doctor! But here comes another aberration. Instead of improving services at home, the U.K is currently projecting to support ‘care in the community for elderly’ people in China stipulates the Telegraph.uk again. In Canada the state of affair isn’t better at all and care rationing begins to look much like that in the UK.
Capitalism and Socialism Banding Together
By now the trend should rather be obvious: socialized healthcare wouldn’t go anywhere without capitalism and otherwise. Both are putting the Gift Of Life on life support. It all becomes crystal clear when probing the overbilling disaster. Capitalism is antagonistic to efficient treatments. And socialism seeks to further regulate, all of which gives the industry and big-pharma alike more power. According to Malcolm Sparrowd, a mathematician at Harvard, the overbilling fraud estimate adds up to a minimum sum of $270 billion a year or at least ten percent of all health care expenses. Regulations never work because there’re drafted by the one-sided profits hunters themselves and a bunch of aggressive lobbyists buying politics. Any genuine action to fix the mess will destroy healthcare as we know it. Meanwhile corruption continues unabated.
To read this long investigation into the monetization of the Gift Of Life further and learn about The Earth Custodians Movement, please go to:
earthcustodians.net/blog/2017/02/08/healthcare-profits-put-us-all-on-life-support/
Some of the sources (and many more at the original link)
The Crime of Overbilling Healthcare https://blog.nader.org/2014/08/29/the-crime-of-overbilling-healthcare/
How doctors and hospitals have collected billions in questionable Medicare fee https://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/09/15/10810/how-doctors-and-hospitals-have-collected-billions-questionable-medicare-fees
