Necessary cost control for health care
By Daniel at 16 May, 2009, 10:42 pm
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In most of those health care systems, they have delays or rationing that the people seem to accept as necessary to control costs. For example, in the Finland’s system I notice that they had this to say.
quote:
Municipal Health Centres (Terveysasemat) in Finland
Primary healthcare is provided by municipal health centres. They are usually only open for specific hours on weekdays, so you should make an appointment to see a doctor if you want to avoid a lengthy wait. You need to use the centre which is closest to the place where you live; it is not possible to make a doctor’s appointment at a different surgery than the one most local to you.
http://www.expat-finland.com/living_in_finland/healthcare.html
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Each nation has found ways to deal with rising costs. What is concerning is that we have a lot of our needs imported. We even send MRI’s to Australia digitally to be read. If the dollar does its expected swan dive in a year or so, there is no system public or private that will be affordable for us.
Much of our rising cost has been due to a falling dollar. We have masked so much of our problems with inflation and debt and interest on debt that we don’t realize that health care, especially things that are imported or that have added costs due to tax compliance costs, litigation and other factors the other nations don’t have, that we can’t win if we don’t reform some of the other costs as well that are passed on.
Tax and tax compliance should be much lower if not gone entirely in a national system. However, that won’t help enough if we don’t stop the dollar’s devaluation over time. Because wages have been kept artificially low by understating CPI, workers have not been able to keep up with the rising costs. It has helped GDP look positive but, GDP hasn’t been rising nearly as fast as it should to maintain our standard of living. It isn’t just health care we no longer can afford.
We can’t afford to maintain our infrastructure. We can’t keep S.S. checks up with real inflation. We can’t fund our military without debt due to both its excessive deployment around the world and rising costs of equipment and oil.
Look at our budget and you see that interest on debt is one of the largest expenses we have when you include the interest on trust funds we borrowed all surplus from. All money going to interest, whether public or intergovernment ($470 billion) is money not available for health care, Social Security, or any other need we have. Then add interest we cover with taxes for cities and states. Then add interest in prices we pay for corporate debt. Then subtract personal interest from our paychecks and then you see why we can’t afford a lot of things even if we get some things in them corrected.
Total debt is like before the great depression only worse. This time it is 370% of GDP as you can see by this chart.
http://www.financialsense.com/Market/panzner/2009/0326.html
There is no fix for health care in this nation until we fix the core problem, debt. AND, we have passed the point where we can grow or tax out of that problem.
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