In Health Fight, Government and Insurers Are Cast as Villains - WSJ.com: "doctors and patients, left to themselves, often order unnecessary and costly treatments, contributing to soaring national health costs."
The above statement is the health care cost issue in a nutshell. The closest thing to a solution is to design insurance plans that don't make patients and doctors accomplices in unnecessary health spending. If the patient were to question each expenditure, many times a lower cost alternative would be identified. The patient, however, will only do this if he has an economic incentive to do so.
Such economic incentives cannot address all of the challenges of allocating health care. To some degree, there will alway need to be limits imposed from above. Which then begs the question, "who do you want imposing those limits?" The choices are:
1) a government monopoly, under constant pressure from special interests, and perpetually underfunded
2) a choice of insurance companies and plans that compete for your business, and who, in many cases, have to lay out for you in advance what their criteria are going to be for limiting spending.
I can't believe anyone has to pause over such a choice.
Yesterday at a Tea Party Rally, I met a fifty year old four time survivor of breast cancer. Were she a ward of the British NHS, she'd be dead today. The very drugs that have kept her alive here in the US have been declared too expensive for British breast cancer patients.
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