Healthcare Systems

What do you think you are paying for?

When I was a child, my mom and dad were not affluent. My mother and father, while having college degrees, did not live in a luxury house, did not drive fancy cars, and did not buy objects of opulence. When me and my younger brother had the sniffles, or had an earache, or broke a bone, or even when my brother needed surgery for a hernia he had literally at the age of three or four, they paid the doctor.

The reason we now have the type of economics we have regarding healthcare is something called an insurance company.

During high school I went to school with a very intelligent guy. He is now the top engineering vice president at Oracle, which is the top database company in the world, headed by the wealthiest man in California, Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs all started their computer careers at the same company, MIPS, who made the first consumer computer, which really just allowed tech guys to flip some switches which affected a light array, but we all loved it because it costs 100 and we could do it at home.

While me and my friend were in high school, his father, who was a gynecologist, told my friend over and over not to go into medicine. His father, during his career, had made lots of money. My friend lived in a nice house, his parents drove luxury cars, and they did whatever they wanted, plus they had a pool which I did not have. But his father told him to run from the medical field as if it was chasing him with a flaming torch. So, my friend did. It did not hurt that he liked computers, but he followed his father’s advice. His father provided this advice because during his career he had already experienced how the medical field was beginning to get encroached by the insurance companies. Why? Opportunity.

The insurance companies began to see that if they could convince big organizations like banks and governments, that they could save them costs by taking groups of doctors, and negotiating better prices through more efficient patient acquisition, then once they had them lined up, stopping the system would be impossible. What has now occurred in America? Either we have almost every single person who is middle class or lower that actually HAS healthcare only able to receive it through some form of insurance arrangement through their employer, whether it be a big organization or government or a small one, or they just do not have it all. What happens if you do not have healthcare insurance and suddenly you need something critical? Either to keep you alive or to keep you from experiencing extreme pain? Well, you either die or you live in extreme pain.

The problem with this system is that it completely wipes away the concept of free choice. If you want a different system than the one that is already arranged through your employer, then you are out of luck. Your only option is to say a prayer, or bite the bullet, as harsh as that sounds. But people do both. I have known both, and neither seems to work particularly well as you might guess.

What is the solution? Well, in America, since now most experts believe we need to give the government FORTY PERCENT of our money…we hope they will begin to split the connection between insurance companies and the medical community. After all, what started as something that looked good to the doctors, now looks terrible for the country. Plus, if you talk to many surgeons, specialists, nurses…they will tell you they got a raw deal.

After all, when was the last time you signed up for an insurance policy, something happened, you made a claim, and then they gave you the amount of money you actually needed to cover the cost of the liability? Or, to put it more blatantly, sometimes when you sign up for an insurance policy, such as a life insurance policy, do you even really care when the check arrives? You spent decades paying all that money, then your wife dies. Do you really care?

Most of it is a scam that we cannot escape.