All this talk of a single payer, public option aka government run healthcare system and none of it addresses what is truly wrong with the system we have right now and how it could be fixed instead of changed completely.
Having formerly worked for a doctor and then a payer for insurance companies, I have a few facts of life that everyone doesn't know and perhaps they should.
First, how many of you know that a doctor, to be able to be accepted and payed for seeing a patient under certain plans, has to sign a contract stating they will accept (XXX percentage of their actual bill) to be allowed the privilege of seeing patients covered under that insurance company?
Sometimes that percentage is as low as 20 percent of the actual bill, leaving 80 percent of the work done, unpaid for.
If they don't sign those contracts, they are not an accepted physician under that plan and patients cannot go to that doctor and have the bills paid.
This leads to prices hiking up so a doctor can recoup all that money that insurance companies refuse to pay.
You can see how that trickles right down on Americans.
Then you have the drug industry, where certain medications can cost up to $20, $30, $40, $50 and higher, for one pill and the insurance companies won't cover that cost.
The fact is, millions of Americans pay into their healthcare, week after week, month after month, year after year and when something happens and they need medical attention, the insurance companies do anything they can, find any reason they can dig up, to simply not pay for the procedures done.
Does this sound like I am against private insurers?
I am not, I am totally opposed to Obamacare and a single payer, public option... just to make that clear. The government has no place in my health decisions......not now, not ever.
What I am saying is that instead of trying to shove a government healthcare down our throats, who would do the exact same thing as the insurance companies are doing now, refusing to pay, making doctors accept a small portion of the payment they are due for services rendered, deciding for us whether our decisions on our healthcare are the "right" ones, perhaps we need to fix the system we have now.
(Look at Medicare now and Congress deciding that doctors aren't going to be fully reimbursed)
One place to start:
Make the insurance companies actually pay for the services rendered, that would lower the cost of those services because doctors wouldn't have to hike the charges up to cover the work they are doing.
People claim that those of us against Obamacare just want to keep the status quo, are liars or just ignorant. We all know our healthcare system could be improved on a massive scale.
It does not have to be completely overhauled, we do not need big brother telling us what we can and cannot do with our own health.
What we need is a system we pay into, by our own choice, not stolen from us by raising taxes to cover those not paying into it at all, to pay for the services rendered by the professionals capable of providing those services.
It is called capitalism.
.
