http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN23630273 is the cite where Reuters reports that Blue Cross/Blue Shield is getting in on the action to promote a plan to capture the uninsured.
Proposals including outreach to encourage those eligible for governmental health insurance and tax credits to encourage people to buy health insurance coverage, we ordinary people are left wondering why?
Is there a health care crisis? Are there not enough physicians, not enough clinics, hospitals, medical equipment to go around? If the focus is health insurance then the answer is clearly NO. Health insurance is about providers and insurance companies getting PAID. Payment is a far different issue from health care.
Myth: Getting all the uninsured insured will improve health care: If this presumption is accepted as truth then we are already living the nightmare promised by national insurance--that corruption and scarcity will combine to leave people out of the loop in getting health care as those able to bribe providers to treat them hop to the head of the line. The ability to pay is not supposed to be determinative of whether a person gets health care.
Myth: Merely having "insurance" does not assure health care. People aren't stupid. If you have insurance coverage covering your annual exams and your suggested exams and screenings, and your overall non-crippling medical cost needs, you will not get those "preventive" treatments if you know that your insurance is unlikely to cover the cost of obtaining the medical care required in the event something is wrong. Further, if you are dependent on a daily wage you will not get treatment as readily as someone who is eligible for short term disability and can take the time off from work to be treated. If the goal is to get people to have screenings then the next step will be to require those screenings and here too, using facilities at the health department that are already in place this can be done without purchasing a policy.
Myth: The AMA and insurance companies and governments care about your health. Not likely. There is no evidence that concerns about paying for health care, controlling costs of health care, and maximizing coverage are any part of the agenda for any of these players. Sorry, take off those glasses, it's about money. Can we benefit from these sectors pursuing their goals? Not this way. Prices for health care are not coming down even when restrictions on treatments, exclusions of treatments and our contributions to the costs of treatments are going up. Even this "proposal" by Blue Cross Blue Shield which doesn't even address the cost of fraud or the millions wasted by their own corporate inefficiencies does note that "thirty percent of the care delivered today is either inappropriate or redundant."
Myth: Doctors won't be doctors if they don't get paid enough. Who cares? If we can't afford the cutting edge treatments and the best physicians when we're ill then train any of the unemployed to perform the "preventive" tasks and move on.
It is infuriating that we are not addressing the access to, affordability of and quality of health care rather than the fact that we're left scrambling to pay for insurance to cover care many of us will never receive--but then again, that would require something new: It would require that all these other players look at themselves, govern themselves and restrict themselves---how's that working out for us?
