If you're strictly a lover of erotic romance, read no further. This is me, reverting to an area of expertise I developed in a previous life and spouting off about the horror I see in the President's health care reform act if it comes to pass. I apologize in advance if I've lured you to a post you may not enjoy, but the headache I've had since the law was passed has reached a blowout level!
Yes, I write erotic romance for a living and love it, but before that I spent years as a hospital and medical practice financial manager. I dealt with medicare, medicaid and managed health programs of private insurors on a daily basis, and I soon realized that more than technological advances, the administration of these entitlement-based discount programs exponentially escalated health care costs beyond the general inflation rate.
Historically speaking, charity medical care was provided at local levels. People in need of care got it, and those who could pay, paid. Those who couldn't were cared for, free, by local/county hospitals, nonprofit facilities and medical professionals who didn't have to raise rates to the paying patients in order to make a living on a shrinking number of patients for whom they didn't have to discount services to an untenable level.
Entitlement programs are what have made it impossible for uninsured patients whose income exceeds impossibly low poverty levels to get care at the least costly level appropriate to their conditions. The only places they can be seen is in emergency rooms. This raises hospital costs by exacerbating the level of forced free services provided to the medically indigent who pack their facilities.
Unless it is repealed, Obamacare has/will cause even greater escalation of costs, and much of that cost is due to the entitlements it supports: everyone and every employer must carry health insurance or suffer costly penalties. This means the burden of totally irrelevant administrative costs for reporting, screening and policing the system, both at the provider levels and the Federal government bureaucracies that will administer them.
Everyone deserves quality health carem but no one deserves to be burdened with a Federal program that will cost a fortune in resources and will not benefit most of the people who will be paying for it. We've already mortgaged our children's futures by borrowing money we can't repay. We've weakened the social security system to the point that it is doomed to fail. I suggest a much less costly and bureaucracy-laden solution to this problem.
Using Federal block grants to states and cities, who are in position to know their people's needs, make free medical and dental care available to everyone, rich or poor, healthy or sick, without regard to need, diagnosis or other limiting factors. Fund medical, dental and auxiliary professional schools--it's a crime that a good proportion of doctors in the US have been trained elsewhere because of too few schools--so there will not be a limited supply of workers.
These facilities--hospitals and clinics--would be no-frills, with all the newest/best technology in places where it's reasonably accessible within certain distances/population areas. But they wouldn't have the fancy decor, the private rooms which require higher staffing to provide good care when medical conditions don't dictate the need for isolation, gift shops and dining halls, and other amenities hospitals now use to attract their shrinking pool of paying patients. They would save billions a year by stripping huge fiscal service divisions whose purpose is solely to keep up with statistics and charges that are only relevant when trying to maximize the piddling reimbursements from third-party payors.
You ask how to staff these facilities? Obviously hospitals would have to have nurses, doctors and ancillary personnel. Block grants could be used to fund them, with pay at lower levels than the general market rates, Federal tax credits for employees of the facilities and Federal legislation forbidding unionization of workers in free health care facilites. Students in federally funded schools which I envision being connected with large hospitals serving underserved communities would provide care, and once licensed could volunteer to serve at the facilities at very low pay in order to have their student loans forgiven.
As for clinics, I believe they could be staffed largely by volunteer doctors and ancillary personnel on a part-time basis, with tax credits being given for each block of service provided and forgiveness being granted at some point for any volunteer who has given a certain level of service over time. That way, no specialty would be excluded. Services would be available to all, at no cost, with the time delay dependent on the level of urgency--in other words, a dermatologist volunteer would see and treat skin cancers before giving botox injections to a thrifty society woman or celebrity, and a plastic surgeon would reconstruct a birth defect before doing a breast augmentation.
This would create a dual level of service where people who don't want to wait and are willing to pay for nonurgent services in a competitively pleasant environment can use the private system, but a side-by-side one that would deny care to no one and require no bureaucratic nightmare of entitlement and penalties that Obamacare will layer on top of already onerous administrative requirements of medicare and medicaid.
In case you've read this far and am still interested, I'm a fiscal conservative but a social liberal. (It costs a lot of money to police other people's personal actions that harm no one but themselves, LOL. Particularly on a Federal level.) I support Mitt Romney, whom I feel can bring the country around economically--and who represents a more moderate view of social issues than either of his viable opponents.
The end... Next post will be about my upcoming series, Caden Kink. I promise!
