Darn insurance

... the concepts of Health Care and Insurance.

A doctor is not an insurance agent, yet the current debate is just as much about insurance companies as it is about the actual costs of health care.

I remember back in the 1970's the debate first started about rising insurance costs. The reason given at that time was not the costs of actual heath care, but the growing litigation for malpractice that was becoming the new way of making a fortune. Since that time, the peripheral costs of health care keeps going up and up, while the actual money paid to health care workers hasn't kept the same pace.

Doctors today, complain that they can't afford to keep their offices open, yet the amounts of money flowing to insurance companies gets larger and larger. If the money isn't going to the actual health care providers then where is it going to?

When you pay for insurance at some level you expect the other side(your stance) the drs. to deliver on the goods. its hard to separate the two when they hold hands. Its the point, I wanted to explain in the original post, the costs have gotten out of control. Remember, HMOs were suppose to help maintain costs, but rather they became another tool or worse another middleman to feed. They didn't slow down costs hardly at all in the real sense of the word, they simply "denied" services whenever possible for whatever reason. The whole malpractice issue came up when drs. weren't being accountable for true mistakes and hoped they were buried and forgotten. Excluding the human misery/emotional side, they(drs) never cleaned up their mess and thus the legal side got involved because could be made. Aren't insurance the deep pockets they raid. So, don't make mistakes and don't try to hide stuff and you won't get sued at least in a reasonable world. Nope, you hardly hear a dr. complain and/or testify against a fellow dr. so it becomes yet another issue to contend with. regardless, those that need health care get screwed, those they have it get twisted, and that administer it get to be an adversary of sorts. If you don't want to see any sad stories, then remain healthy.

I believe if this was addressed in a more direct way, at 40yrs. ago before new cures and procedures became common as today, they would have a better handle on this. The growing pains of the health care as people get older and the impression that medicine is becoming better than ever yet you need the care to be so. If not, in no uncertain terms you have a shorten life span. Just having basic care is getting too expensive like broken bones, births, etc.. -----Willy