A recent Pew study concluded that 60% of Americans believe that the government should be responsible for providing healthcare coverage. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/03/most-continue-to-say-ensuring-health-care-coverage-is-governments-responsibility/ The first thing that people need to ask is was the methodology used to perform the study a valid way to extrapolate what over 300 million people really want? And second, can accurate conclusions
The Democrats and the Republicans have done a masterful job of demonizing the physician. The doctor has been the scapegoat for skyrocketing health care costs while giving more power over the medical industry to those entities that have been the architects of the broken healthcare system that we have today. In short, the system is a complex network of corporate middlemen, that have worked tirelessly figuring out ways to skim profits while simultaneously shifting the costs to patients, rationing their care in the form of pre-certifications, increasing premiums, and outright denials on one hand while decreasing physician reimbursements (in the form of bundling), lowering fees, implementing recovery audits to claw back reimbursements, and outright denials of payment after services are rendered on the other. The government has put rules and regulations into place that encourage and reward this behavior, while ensuring that doctors and patients continue to feed a beast that needs increasingly more money to run a system that is based on the management of chronic disease instead of true prevention. It is no wonder that we are spending more money on healthcare and are on more medication, yet we as society are getting sicker.
The implementation of the healthcare reform bill that was passed in March has now begun. Unfortunately, it is becoming obvious that the promises made such as: a) you can keep your physician and medical plan if you like them; b) your healthcare costs will go down; c) there will be no healthcare rationing; and d) everyone will be covered simply were not true. We were fed a steady diet of fear, distraction and falsehoods to sell healthcare reform. Why have none of these changes been implemented? Perhaps it is because this is a system that is set up to fail. When people get so fed up with waiting for treatment, or no longer want to put up with being denied care because a decision is made that the costs outweigh the benefits, the government will be ready to step in with the solution of the single payer system. Unfortunately, when that happens medical care in the United States as we know it will be lost forever, and we will be saddled with a system that even the British find untenable.