Shake Your Medical Moneymaker
If we are ever going to balance our budget, the national budget, everyone is going to have to give up something in the process. There are not enough pork barrel, purely wasteful, vote-buying programs to come close to accomplishing this goal without each of us losing something free, something paid for by government transfers from us to ourselves, in the process. But this is where the problem lies. Nobody wants to give up their bit of “free.” So in a sense, we’re all the problem. An instance is the medical industry.
According the Wall Street Journal, the state of Washington is trying to reduce Medicaid expenditures by controlling how much is spent on unnecessary emergency room visits. This is not a problem unique to Washington, but exists in every state. Medicaid recipients, having no co-pay, no ‘skin in the game,’ go to the emergency room for runny noses, headaches, ingrown fingernails, pregnancy tests or anything that fancies them. The hospitals and emergency room doctors treat them and send you the bill. The bills, being for emergency room visits, are exorbitant. The excuse, to be expected, is: it is an emergency room. So this is one place where government waste could be reduced without causing any harm to the Medicaid recipient. All that they need to do is visit a less expensive setting. It seems a piece of cake, so Washington State is trying to reform the system.
Is the medical establishment supportive? NO! Emphatically not. Doing this might cut into their income. Are they trying to figure out ways to be more efficient and efficacious with taxpayer money? NO! They’re trying to keep their bit and have no interest in reducing the waste in the program. In fact, they oppose this effort. Their opposition is self-serving, although they try to deflect this by saying a Medicaid recipient might avoid coming to the emergency room when they should. Well, they might, but that would be a surprise considering how much the recipients consume in unnecessary medical services now. So here is a place the taxpayers can save, a place we could be reasonable with government waste and is opposed by the well-paid medical establishment. They want to keep their bit of free.
To reinforce the hypocrisy and duplicity of the medical establishment one need only read about the export bill including tobacco, where we are told North Carolina farmers are exporting tobacco that they once sold domestically. Pretending concern for others, the American Medical Association says farmers shouldn’t sell tobacco to someone who wants to buy it, because it is harmful to them. Really! Smoking is harmful. So are a lot of things. Going to the doctor or hospital will put you in the poor house if it doesn’t kill you, which is not completely out of the question. Hundreds of thousands of deaths each year are attributed to medical errors and infections in hospitals, but the doctors don’t seem so overly concerned about that.
Further the relationship between tobacco, illness, death and old age is one of conjecture and, so far as I can determine, false conclusions. Tobacco may cause some people to die sooner than they would otherwise, but they would die anyway. But to listen to the advocates of no smoking, one would think the choice is between smoking and living forever. The real issue is one of expense in the venue of death. The tobacco/various state lawsuit settlements are based on the premise that the states incur greater expenses for tobacco related deaths than they do if people live longer without those tobacco related illnesses. But there is no proof of a higher cost of tobacco related death, only proof of the cost of caring for tobacco related illnesses.
In fact the opposite, a higher cost of living longer, is probably true as lingering on in a ‘retirement’ home, the politically correct term for the place we send old people to die, is extraordinarily expensive to those who pay, all too often the taxpayer. Of course, retirement homes are very lucrative to those who provide the services – the medical establishment. So here they are again, arguing for something that will enhance their income at a cost to the taxpayers and others, while pretending to be concerned about people’s health. Maybe they are concerned about people’s health. But that seems secondary to their concern about their income.
When doctors and hospitals begin to work with others on how to keep their costs of services lower then I’ll believe doctors and hospitals have a concern for others. As it is, all I can see is a concern about their income. And this self-interested concern is only an example of why we will have a problem balancing the federal budget. Because if doctors and hospitals aren’t concerned about the effect their self-serving greed has on others, who will be?
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