Health Care Reform Bill Does Little to Fix Real Problems

Posted on | April 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment

First off, it’s not especially easy to figure out exactly what’s in the new healthcare reform bill. Choices are either trying to decipher the legal speak of the thousand plus page bill itself, or trying to find consensus on the summary points among all the biased reporting.

For the most part it seems to add a lot more poorly thought out regulations along with more taxes to pay for supposedly getting some care for poorer folks and eliminating pre-existing condition gotcha’s.

What it does not do is fix what’s really broken in the current system, which is fraud and absurdly overpriced services.

healthcare reform Speaking of fraud, I seriously doubt we’d need to raise taxes or come up with other ways to pay for improved healthcare if we would just fix the existing misuse and abuse problems in the current healthcare system.

I mean how hard can it be for Medicare to not accept claims from dead doctors? And yet they send out hundreds of millions of dollars to these scam artists. Or how about the guys that bought the defunct hospital for it’s Medicare license and then proceeded to bilk Medicare for four billion dollars in fraudulent claims? All they did was set up some computers and crank out claims.

healthcare reform Seems to me there is plenty of money to be saved and spent on useful services if Medicare could get its act together and stop flushing billions of dollars down the drain.

The other thing not addressed in this so-called Health Reform Bill is the hyper-inflated prices we pay for everything from doctors, hospitals, prescription drugs, etc.

As an example, I was reviewing the Explanation of Benefits (EOBs) I received recently for some tests and lab work my wife had done. The EOB showed that of $362 of billed services, the insurance company paid $86. There was also a note relating to the $275 not covered which said the amount billed is greater than the amount allowed for this service and that I would not be billed for this amount.

While most folks look at that and think gee, I’m glad I have this insurance so I don’t have to pay that non-covered amount, I instead think why the heck was that amount even charged? And don’t fall for that absurd we make it up on volume comeback.

Bottom line is that it’s plain old price-gouging. Without insurance, I would have to pay the whole $362 versus just the $86 that the insurer got away with, and that’s just not right. The hospital and lab are grossly inflating their prices and that’s something that could actually stand a little regulating, along with all the other fees charged by hospitals and doctors.

Heck, most folks, me included, would just pay the $86 out-of-pocket and not even bother with insurance. And just think, if all healthcare services were provided at a fair price, we wouldn’t even need insurance except for the super-costly procedures - gee didn’t it used to be that way?

As a matter of fact it did. In the beginning, the average Joe just needed insurance for the catastrophic problems. But over the years the system fed on itself and got us to where the U.S. has one of the least satisfactory yet over-priced healthcare systems in the world.

Congress could fix this if they wanted, but they refuse to make the hard choices like ignoring the lobbyists, dealing with tort reform, and basically doing something that actually serves the best interest of the people.