One of the most pressing issues in today’s government is the
continuously rising healthcare costs. Recently, healthcare has risen to one of
the most hotly debated topics in politics, as is evident by the debate around Obamacare
and its repeal. With these changes in healthcare recently, the goal has always
been to make healthcare more available to those that need it without making those
that support them pay a ridiculous amount of money. They try to achieve this by
doing things like expanding Medicaid and offloading the extra expenses onto the
higher-income tax payers in the case of Obamacare. While the goal of making
healthcare more available is a noble goal, the way that politicians have been
going about it is like putting a bandage on a wound instead of healing the
wound. Instead of finding ways to help people pay off their healthcare expenses
we should work to find ways to reduce the costs of healthcare directly.
In every hospital there is something called a chargemaster,
which is just a collection of the costs of their services and any items that
may contribute to those services. This may sound completely harmless until one
actually looks inside the chargemaster and sees that something as small and
cheap as a Tylenol pill can cost as much as 40 dollars, while normally costing
around fifty cents. All the prices in those chargemasters are similarly insane,
leading to the question of how this even happened in the first place. One’s
first instinct may be to blame the hospitals for jacking up prices on purpose
for the sole reason of getting more profit. However, only around 20 percent of
hospitals are for-profit, the majority being non-profit, which means that they
do not operate to seek the greatest profit. The reason for these massively
jacked up prices are the result of insurance companies asking for discounts
when negotiating bills, meaning that insurance companies only pay a fraction of
the costs that hospitals deem as the actual price. The issue this causes for
the average person is that it forces people to go through insurance companies
and pay their premium to get fair prices, leaving anyone who cannot afford insurance
to pay exorbitant amounts of money for something as small as a Tylenol pill.
The government is currently going through more changes in
the healthcare system with the trump administration attempting to repeal
Obamacare, however they are again focusing on the wrong aspect of healthcare
that needs changing. Instead of finding ways to help people pay of their
healthcare bills they need to moderate the actual prices that are being
charged.
1 comment:
A blog posted on Red White and Blue Government brings up the topic of the government's approach to health care. The problem with healthcare is its rising expenses that many can not afford to pay. The government deals with the problem by aiding people in paying off these costs while avoiding to solve the source of these problems, which is to decrease the expenses of health care. Often times, buying medicine from a store can cost a lot more than they should due to a chargemaster, which is intended to lead citizens into getting health insurance in order to lower these prices.
After reading this informative commentary, I agree with the writer's argument about the government's approach to health care. They have consistently tried to help people pay for healthcare without accumulating a huge debt by establishing the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare. What they government should do is prioritize this issue by getting rid of the problem as a whole. Lowering the cost of healthcare would effectively solve the problem because it is the source that is stemming this complication. Instead, they continue to focus on temporarily finding a solution such as healthcare, which would only assist in reducing the cost. At the moment, I think fixing the problem may be difficult because our government is not approaching the problem which a mindset to get rid of the issue. They are looking at other options such as a replacement for Obamacare, and not everyone is agreeing that this is the proper solution. Republicans are renouncing Trump’s attempt to obstruct Obamacare after the Senate was unsuccessful in advancing the law. This shows that actually getting down to a solution may be more difficult than we think because the president and the senate are not agreeing on a decision.
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