Get government OUT of healthcare!

HT to Anastasia over at Kyrie Eleison for her little post on "Medicare." Here's her post, in its elegant and poignant simplicity:

Medicare

Item: When my husband went on Medicare, we assumed our insurance costs, now being footed by the U.S. Government, would go down. Shouldn't they? They went UP. It costs us more to be covered by Medicare than by our private insurance alone. Who do you think receives the extra money?

Item: We saw on the news last week that if a patient comes in complaining of having fainted, Medicare pays "only" $7,000 to the health care provider. This low figure has been tempting some health care organizations to instruct their doctors not to call if fainting, but to call it central nervous system something-or-other, because that diagnosis brings in many times more dollars from Medicare.

Fainting is a complaint my husband says can be resolved in less than half an hour at a cost of perhaps $50 to the doctor or practice.

WHO PAYS SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS for a fainting fit? You? Forget it. Your private health care insurance? Dream on. Only the U.S. Government.

And why? I defy you to make any sense of it without saying it involves corruption. The answer is, a lot of congressional somebodies are being paid a lot of money to funnel these kinds of dollars to doctors and hospitals.

ITEM: When my husband had his carotid artery operated on in March of this year, he spent one night in the hospital. The hospital's charge for this (not to be confounded with the doctors' charges, which are separate things) was $5,830.00. For one night. Without any particularly complicated care, as all went smoothly enough for him to be discharged the following morning. Medicare paid $3,000, which is still outrageous. And the remainder? The hospital, we were told, would write it off. Meaning it would receive $3,000 but, come tax time, claim a $2,830 loss.

The truth is, a major part of why the cost of health care in this country is so high is the federal government's corrupt involvement in it. Therefore the probability is, we would all, from infants to seniors, have been better off had there never been a Medicare. So yes, in that sense, I am against Medicare.

Does that mean I'm in favor of just dropping it? No, definitely not, because that would leave seniors, largely on a fixed income, defenseless in a sea of sharks. It ought to be dropped, yes, but only in the context of an overall reform in the American health care system. A real reform, I mean, not Obamacare. A reform in which medical charges bear some resemblance to actual costs, in which profits are not outrageous or extortionate, in which doctors and hospitals and pharmacies are paid directly by the patients, without any price-gougers interposing themselves between and dictating treatments. A reform brought about carefully, thoughtfully, and gradually.

We'd all pay less, seniors included, seniors especially.

Oh, and we'd also be living more nearly by the Constitution, which does not accord the federal government the power to set up or administer a program like Medicare.