The Current System

You know I’m not a big capitalist, well maybe I am, I guess I am for capitalism well enough, I just want safety nets and some regulation so that the guys with the moneybags don’t buy the government and make their own rules.

But capitalism, the free market, those are more like the laws of nature, the nature of human nature, than they are ideologies. Nobody had to invent free markets it’s just naturally the way things work.

But in order for it to work, people have to know what things cost, and that is one of the problems with the current insurance system, especially when, as in most cases, you get it from your employer, so that even though it comes out of your wages, you never actually see it come out of your wages, so you assume it is free. As far as the employee whose company fully pays for his health insurance is concerned we already have socialized medicine.

During my recent bout with pneumonia, I had a chest x-ray which was fine, that was where the trouble was, but once I was cured and fit as a fiddle, I had another chest x-ray which wasn’t really needed, but insurance covered it, so what the hell? I don’t remember exactly what it was, but there was one of their new-fangled machines they wanted to run on me, but it turned out insurance didn’t cover that so we agreed that it probably wasn’t necessary.

Anyway when I got the bill it was like five hundred bucks each, One thousand all together! And at first I am outraged of course, but then I am snickering, that’s what the saps that don’t have insurance pay, but then it occurs to me that somewhere that grand is going into the coffers of the hospital, and it must be coming from somebody, and if I follow the chain past the insurance company and their fat slice of the take that they are taking, it is coming out of me.

And it’s worse than that, because that thousand isn’t really what the insurance company is paying because all those companies make deals with the hospitals and they are paying something less, so that the only people who are paying that five hundred bucks are people without insurance and most of them are surely poor so they are not paying anything, and when you get right down to it, nobody really knows what all is going on.

And nobody much knows what is going on with Obamacare either, but it does seem most everybody will be covered so that we won’t have so many people showing up in emergency rooms and running up big bills that they will never pay, and I think that is where the savings will come from that will pay for the program. Most of the big thinkers seem to think it will end up costing less, but they may be wrong and some other not so big thinkers, think it will cost more. You say it will add another layer of bureaucracy, and maybe so, but geez it is already so incomprehensible what difference will that make? I think it will be better, and maybe it will get people to thinking, just what exactly do we need insurance companies for?

Still want to get to that Beagles/Ideas, Uncle Ken/People thing, but time has run out this morning.