Yostivanich

Now nor­mally, I don’t tend to talk a whole lot beyond tech news, how­ever this arti­cle in the New York Times caught my eye. So let’s start with the obvi­ous, health care is a big issue now mat­ter which side of the debate. I think every­one can agree that peo­ple should have some sort of expected min­i­mum amount of care as opposed to sim­ply throw­ing peo­ple out on the streets. At the same time peo­ple don’t and prob­a­bly in all hon­esty at least for a while will not wish to have the gov­ern­ment pay for everyone’s health care to the max — a sin­gle payer sys­tem such as in Canada/UK/France or social­ized med­i­cine as crit­ics like to call it.

Per­son­ally I would like that sys­tem, but I know that as far as the imme­di­ate term goes it is an unat­tain­able goal, so the imme­di­ate plan that I think could reduce health care costs, pro­vide a bet­ter over­all level of health to all Amer­i­cans and hope­fully cut costs for pri­vate insur­ance as well. The gov­ern­ment should pro­vide free annual check­ups and phys­i­cals and pro­vide tax cred­its for a “healthy lifestyle”. This pro­vides sev­eral things, one peo­ple are checked at least once a year for dis­eases that if caught early could save a lot of money and time in treat­ing. Many stud­ies have shown that pre­ven­tive care is effec­tive. The other thing is that as peo­ple develop a healthy lifestyle — through the incen­tive of a tax break, over­all health of Amer­i­cans will improve. While the gov­ern­ment will have to spend money to fund/pay for annual checkups/cancer screen­ings, and more, the gov­ern­ment will actu­ally save money by not hav­ing to spend money later on as peo­ple have a health­ier lifestyle and suf­fer from less dis­eases such as can­cer and heart diseases.

Some­thing else, why are insur­ance com­pa­nies a for-profit orga­ni­za­tion, does that make any sense to any­body? We have orga­ni­za­tions whose stated goal and are required by law to reduce costs and max­i­mize prof­its decid­ing if some­one can get an oper­a­tion or if a drug is med­ically nec­es­sary rather than the person’s doc­tor. If you can make sense of this, leave a com­ment, because I sure can’t.

If you want more info on this sort of thing, Sicko is a pretty decent movie to watch although I do have issues with the movie.

jtyost2

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