rawdawgb.blogspot.com
Article Reprint
I have openly stated for the record that if one desires to explore how the Federal Government operates in the function of health care administrator, just look at the Veterans Administration Hospital Services – where the average wait time to see a physician is five months. In all sincerity, this is how, based on observation and past history, I perceive Obamacare will be implemented and administered. However, I will say, regardless of political affiliation, one must wait and see if the Affordable Care Act actually accomplishes and does what it was indicated to do when initially proposed by and signed into law by the President.
It was first hard to understand why any legislature would vote for a bill that none had ever read, to have any comprehension of all the mandates, subsides and regulations entangled in large sums of paper that represented the law itself. However, it is possible to evaluate its eventual effectiveness – namely by determining if it actually meets its objectives of reducing health care cost, provide health care coverage for all and lastly, if you can actually do what the President stated: keep your physicians or policy if you like them.
The last is a given so I won’t spend too much effort on that. However, the first, reducing cost is the main concern. It should be clear that in order to reduce health care cost, one must know how much health care service are in dollar terms. This is something that varies by hospital to hospital and specialty to specialty as research notes. For example, the Washington Post reported that the cost for a patient on a ventilator at one hospital was $115,000 and $53,000 at another and $30,000 at yet another. Procedures for lower limb replacement in the same article ranged from $117,000 to $25,600. One example showed that inpatient cost for joint replacement in Oklahoma was $5,300 but $223,000 in Monterey, California. In NYC, cost for treating asthma varied 321% between two hospitals approximately 60 blocks apart. And I won’t even go into cost for aspirin, toilet paper and overnight stays in a hospital ward.
A social Marxist would say let us have one cost across the board, but such would not consider a surgeon with 20 years experiences and no clinical complications experienced by patients and a first year without any clinical experience (which would go against all the rules of rewarding expertise and competency).