by DGFone » September 17th, 2012, 3:55 am
To add a little bit of "real world and what politicians say don't match":
As some of you know, I recently came back from the hospital. This was because I had a follow-up surgery, and one that I really did not need, but really wanted. For other people who had the same problem as me, and went through the first surgery, they had an option: go through the follow-up surgery or not. Not to go into specifics, both options had pros and cons, and for many, when the question of "if you had the option, would you have taken the second surgery or not?", half would go through the second surgery again, and half would not.
Why is this related to politics:
There is one other group of people who were 100% for doing the second surgery, and non of them would only go through the first: they are on medicare (government healthcare). Because after the first surgery, you need to get medical supplies, and your insurance usually pays for them. Why are all the medicare people against this? Medicare grantees that they get the supplies at no cost...
1. The quality of the supplies provided by medicare is much worse than other variations that other insurance companies would pay for. (And yes, I tried both. The Medicare variation IS BAD.)
2. Per unit cost, Medicare was twice more expensive than others. Again, you yourself don't pay a cent, but how is the government supposed to lower the debt when it pays twice as much as it needs to, for worse quality service?
3. With my insurance, I had to deal with the company paying for too many supplies, to the point where I had more than I needed. Of course, insurance companies don't want to pay more than they need to, so one short phone call later fixed the problem. With Medicare, it was discovered that on average, people use up about 20 of these supplies per month, and that's all it pays for. It can happen that you will need more than 20, and if you are on medicare, no matter what you do, you will not get more, no matter how much you need these supplies.
TL/DR: Personal experience convinced me that the U.S. does not know how to provide healthcare to anyone.
