Next, let's stipulate, just for the cause of discussion, that illegal aliens cost American taxpayers a billion dollars each year. US health care costs are running $1.6 TRILLION annually. Take out your calculator. Here's the percentage: .0625!
Understand this is not an epistle in defense of anyone
crossing a US
border illegally. But it is a harangue that those who are inclined to the
notion to get off the illegal-aliens-are-the-cause-of-every-problem wagon. They
most certainly are not a significant contributor to the health care delivery
crisis. And just because some may believe something no more makes it so than
could the Roman Catholic Church make the sun orbit the earth when it put
Galileo on trial for postulating the opposite was true.
But here, in no order, are just a few of the reasons the US health care delivery system is the very worst in the world.
We've too few doctors. Almost all the hurdles for becoming one are intentionally artificial, and are so because medical universities and the profession want it that way. Whether an applicant to a med school is accepted as one of the very privileged few depends on his or her scholarship all the way en route to applying. That exceptions do occur, where a child of the slums and of a parent with a history of drug abuse and jail time, or some other deleterious circumstance, makes it in does not change the statistical rule. Then, once in, the costs to that student for tuition, for text books, for lab fees, for scrubs and whites, and for living day to day are astronomical. Those who make it through frequently leave with debt approaching six figures, and are coerced into a specialty that will permit him or her to pay it off.
All too frequently, physicians own, or are part owners, of the highly expensive, highly lucrative, testing centers that patients are much too routinely referred to. That adds to overall costs. Yeah, there's the problem caused by the need to practice defensive medicine, to order a plethora of tests, to cover the doctor's butt, in case he or she is named a defendant in a malpractice suit. The difficulties capping awards or curtailing litigation are also equally fraught with complexity. As in any human endeavor, there do exist bad doctors, and the profession is reticent to weed them out. It's called professional courtesy. Artificially capping non-economic awards, so called "pain and suffering," leaves only the economic to worry about. But what about a child or a retired senior citizen who has been grievously harmed by a doctor, one who, if the AMA was doing its job, wouldn't even be practicing? What earnings have been denied to the child? Or to the senior who's no longer working? Finally there's the recently noted estimate by Ohio's Senator Sherrod Brown that the high cost of malpractice insurance composes less than a percent of the problem. (http://www.cspan.org/Watch/Media/2009/06/18/HP/A/19927/Senate+HELP+Cmte+Markup+of+Health+Care+Legislation+Day+2.aspx)
Lastly, here, let us not overlook the billions and billions of dollars sacrificed to the for- profit, private health insurance industry. In the pursuit of the highest share price possible, potential subscribers as well as existing ones are scrubbed to deny either application, or, once accepted, to rescind coverage all the way to the date of original issue. Entire armies of clerks and investigators and attorneys are employed in the endeavor to the point that the industry average administrative costs eat 30% of every premium dollar paid. Compare that to 5-7% admin lost to the government for Medicare, for Medicaid, for VA, and in the words of the late Ev Dirksen, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money." Except with the insurance industry, it's hundreds of billions!
And not a moment of this considers the thousands of lives that have been trampled, even terminated, by the insurance industry's refusal to permit care that the patient's doctors recommend, or to permit the hundreds of thousands (millions?) to secure any level of health care because of preexisting conditions.
For all who want to talk simple net, get off the rickety illegal aliens are the problem wagon. That's nothing but the most debased of all arguments, beneath all contempt.
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