McCain: The Answer To Rising Health Care Costs Is Wal-Mart
He’ll be mocked for this by the left/media (same thing) but he’s not wrong:
Think about this for a moment: What’s the biggest problem with American health care? It’s not the quality (we’ve got the best doctors and hospitals in the world), it’s the cost. So why does it cost so much? Because pretty much every transaction in the health care industry involves three parties: The care provider, the patient and whoever is paying for the patient’s care. And for the vast majority of us, that’s either a government program or an employer-backed plan.
We go to pretty much whatever doctor or hospital we want without heed for the cost because, let’s face it, we’re not paying for it. At least not directly.
That doctor or hospital charges us pretty much any exorbitant fee they want because, again, we’re not paying for it directly.
The insurance company gets stuck with the big fees and their only options are to just pay it or to try and dispute the charges with the hospital. Which usually leads to costly legal battles that make such challenges not very cost effective. So the insurance companies pony up and try to manage costs by either limiting our access to care (dictating which doctors we can see and which procedures are covered) or jacking up premiums.
Imagine if we paid for our health care directly. Hospitals and doctors wouldn’t be able to jack up fees because we’d be paying for it, and there’d be little point to do that anyway since individually we don’t have the deep pockets of insurance companies and said hospitals/doctors aren’t about to price themselves out of the market.
Plus, if we got billed too much (or got poor service, etc.) we could just take our money and go to whatever doctor or hospital or clinic we wanted. Which is something that doesn’t happen much now. Most localities are served by just a handful of hospitals and clinics that just about everyone goes to, and we all go to them because, again, we don’t have a lot of incentive to shop around for health care because our insurance is picking up the tab.
But if we did pay for own health care directly and we did shop around for care our health care system would not only be more affordable we’d also have more care and treatment choices available to us as doctors and hospitals and clinics popped up to compete for our suddenly more discerning business.
And maybe, just maybe, one of the entities that would get into that competition would be Wal-Mart. Would that be such a bad thing? Wal-Mart already has a solid reputation for providing Americans with the goods and services they want at reasonable prices (look at all the people who shop there).
I’m pretty sure I could get better quality care at a Wal-Mart clinic than I could at the hospital I go to now. Tags: Domestic Issues, Politics
