Part of this bill which President Obama has failed to say to anyone is that payments to doctors for their medicare and medicaid patients will go down. Doctors have already come out and started dropping their elderly patients because frankly they cant afford them. Doctors need to make a living too and the cost of medical malpractice insurance keeps those ridiculous salaries moving even higher. Doctors dropping their patients places a false demand on the doctors who do still accept them or are government paid doctors, increasing the costs even further. On top of that at a time when the baby boom generation is aging and will be flooding hospital rooms and doctors offices with their medicare backed insurance. This will create a false demand and in turn increase costs and increase mistakes as well. Sounds like a recipe for a disaster if you ask me.
One thing this bill completely and utterly fails to do is address one of the largest issues with our skyrocketing health care costs. This one issue being taken care of could eliminate half of our problems in health care. Place limits on medical malpractice lawsuits. Patients assume they go to a doctor and they should be able to fix everything. In this day in age the patient assumes no responsibility when they go into a surgery, and this is wrong. Every person is different and many of the procedures doctors perform today were not even available 50 years ago. Millions of more people would be dead today if doctor had not advanced medicine the way they have this century. Yet the patients again assume no responsibility. Doctors salaries are so high because it is common place for them to pay 100,000 dollars per year out of their own pocket just for this insurance, even if they have never had an issue.
Patients sue because a doctor didn't do enough to keep their 75 year old father from dying from heart failure or failing to keep his lungs clear of fluid. Guess what people? old people die. Guess what, young people die too and no matter what the doctor does they are just human. Doctors do extraordinary things everyday to keep us alive. Things that they do today many of us would have died 100 years ago. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold doctors accountable but there needs to be accountability on both sides. If a fat 300 pound woman goes to a doctor for liposuction and dies from an infection, that's not the doctors fault. If that woman had not gorged herself she would not have been there in the first place. If a Doctor is found to intentionally hurt or killed someone then that is a different matter. Many malpractice lawsuits are patients who died and the doctor unintentionally made a wrong move, or made his first error of his 20 year career. That doesn't entitle a person to millions upon millions of dollars.
Patients need to assume some risk as well. If they were to cap lawsuits at a reasonable amount, say half a million dollars, this would lower insurance for doctors tremendously. This in turn would lower the need to keep raising what we pay doctors, but not only that lower the need to administer the same test to a patient 3 and 4 times to cover their butt in case they get sued. Hospitals and doctors run test after unnecessary test just to cover themselves in case they were to get sued. All these extra tests cost money, lots of money. This would all be saved if you cap malpractice lawsuits. I repeat, if it is found that the doctor intentionally was out to hurt people this would be a different matter. If there is criminal wrong doing, which a majority of the time there is not in these lawsuits, then you should throw the book at these doctors. A doctor didn't become one to kill people but to help. If one makes a mistake, yes it is tragic, but it should not end his career and it should not cost all of us.
One more item that could be included in this bill. Allow people to shop around to other states for insurance. Insurance rates are artificially high in many areas of the country because there is little or no competition. If you live in Illinois you are limited to only a few insurance companys. If you dont like what they offer, to bad. You don't have a choice. If they allowed people to buy insurance from companies elsewhere who have better plans for them, this would increase competition and lower costs.
These are changes that can be made to actually lower costs for us as consumers of these insurance plans, and in the end make them more affordable so more of us can buy them. If you want to save money on health care you need to go at what is actually causing the increased costs. Medical malpractice, open up competition, and pay Doctors what they need to treat medicare patients. All of these in the end will drive costs lower and save you, me, and all of us as US taxpayers money, money we could be spend to improve our economy and improve our lives.
