Health care costs. Im confused.

[loveable liberal]

We can cap salary's of baseball players and try to cap NHL players salary's. Northwest Airlines simply lay's off mechanics and outsources the work to other countries. There has been so much talk about how much health care costs, why hasnt the health care industry been asked to cap their costs? Every month theres a new wing on some hospital. I find it hard to believe that research is the reason for increases. Why hasnt anyone looked at salary structures in the health care industry. Im betting health care providers are just as bad as the pentagon in wasting peoples money.

[marew]

1. Because the health care industry has invested a fortune...

in lobbying congress so the rest of us peons should shut up and suffer and pay and pay and pay.

[loveable liberal]

2. oh....yea.....there is that..... nt

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. I have lost count

of the number of times I have heard people in the pharmaceutical and heath care industry brag about the money they make. They aren't doctors or nurses, but administrators, insurance execs, and salesmen.

[loveable liberal]

5. It doesnt stop there.

One of our public utilities is requesting an increase in rates. I worked for the company for 10 years and saw salary abuses all over the place. Vice presidents engaging in empire building. Empire building is the practice of offering higher paying salaries to employees to make the section appear more important when its time to cut costs. Essentially offering a 70-90 thousand a year position to a person who's functions require 45 thousand a year. I dont have a problem with the profit motive of items people choose to have. But trying to maximize profit on things that people need like health care and utilities is disgusting especially when they abuse it.

[Warpy]

4. Salaries aren't the only things driving health care costs

although there are CEOs of the larger insurance and for profit hospital conglomerates whose salaries are at the level of embezzlement.

Rather, what's driving health care costs is first and foremost the need to suck profit out of a system that was never meant to be in the marketplace.

That need is expressed in health facilities trying to be all things to all people and constantly buying the newest and most expensive technology (while skimping on staff). This results in a ridiculous duplication of enormously expensive services within a single market, and drives costs. Much of that equipment stands idle much of the time, and generates only a depreciation allowance on the facility's taxes.

Another thing is the Byzantine paperwork from competing insurance plans and the need to cope with mutiple bureacracies. Fully fifty cents of every dollar a hospital gets goes to paperwork.

Greed has certainly factored into this, especially at the level of the drug companies, who seek to sell their drugs to people who can't prescribe them and probably don't need them by carefully worded and expensive TV commercials that medicalize a lot of very normal phenomena. Insurance plans all complain they're being squeezed to death between drug costs and stockholders' expectations, and this is a massive drive to increased medical costs.

If you want less of any commodity, cap its cost to the public. If you want more of it, subsidize it. It's always worked that way. Right now, the tax laws subsidize the very things we should be discouraging: overbuying of unnecessary equipment, out of control CEO pay packages, and writeoffs for things like advertising.

Until and unless we stop treating illness like a consumer decision, this will continue. Until and unless we recognize the need for labor in a labor intensive field, we'll see technology favored over people.

And until the DLC is out of power, none of this will be addressed.

[dflprincess]

6. Another cost no one thinks of

is what insurance brokers and agencies make when they sell a health insurance policy to a company or individual. Up to around 10% of the premium you're paying is going to the salesperson who sold you the policy. If your premium goes up 16%, the agent gets a 16% increase in his/her commission. It may not sound like much if you're thinking of an individual policy, but think about what kind of premiums big companies like Target are paying.

This is why the NY attorney general is looking at some of the big insurance agencies. He's suspicious that they sold their clients on a particular health insurance company only because that company paid the agency a higher commission than another company would have. The insurance agent is suppose to sell based on their client's interest, not on how big their commisison will be.