Imagep, actually I believe that the regulations will be provided at less cost (to all).
Such preventive medical procedures would result in net decrease of the insurers’ long term expenses. There are also the additional benefits due to increasing life spans and/or better quality of life for clients. Additionally taxpayers will not suffer government expenses due to those unwilling or unable to co-pay for the recommended preventive medical procedures.
The additional cost you refer to is the immediate expense of preventive medical procedure that (MAY in aggregate) cause a 1.5% price increase but the medium and long term affect will be lesser than otherwise expenses to all, (i.e. medical insurers, their clients, patients and our government).
Respectfully, Supposn
I have been told that the only "preventative" care that is cost effective is to stop smoking, stop drinking, eat better, loose weight, and exercize more. Ya don't have to go to the doc for any of that preventative care.
Things such as screenings, although certainly have value to the individual, are actually not cost effective.
Like take mamograms for example: how much does a mamogram cost, I dunno, lets assume $300. Now what if the local public hospital had a free mamogram week and 10,000 ladies participated. Maybe only 10 would be found to have a tumor, and maybe only 5 of those would have not discovered it anyway in a timely manner, and some of those found to have a tumor would likely be in such a late stage that no money would be saved by early detection. So maybe the average savings due to early detection would have been $10,000 yielding a cost savings of $100,000. But it costed $3 million bucks to test all those people.
That said, I have nothing against someone paying for a screening, but they need to do so at their own expense because it is not cost effective for it to be done at the taxpayers expense.
I actually proposed my own health care plan to my local congressman, spoke to him for an hour and a half in his office, and he totally blew me off.
But anyhow, my plan was to eleminate all current forms of government provided health care, to include: medicare, medicade, VA, SCHIP, the health department, and insurance for current and retired government employees. These services cost the tax payer $1.2 trillion, which averages out to about $4,000 per citizen. True health insurance, as opposed to the pre-paid health insurance that most of us think of as "good" insurance, is fairly inexpensive. I used to pay $800 per month to cover my family with a prepaid plan, I dropped it years ago and replaced it with a high deductable major medical policy. The (blue cross blue shield) major medical plan cost me $210. Thats an annual cost of about $2,500 and an annual savings to me of about $7,000/yr. My savings alone more than covers the cost of my deductable, so I opened up a HSA and every month I deposit my savings into it (tax free). My HSA draws interest, and when I have a medical expense I simply use a check from my HSA account to pay for the medical cost. I now have way more than enough money in my HSA to cover the maximium out of pocket expense for my entire family, and the money is mine and no one can take it away.
So my plan was for the government to purchase a high deductable major medical plan for every single American at a cost of around $840/yr. Sure, rates may have to be a little higher to cover sickly people and elderly people, but that may be offset by the savings of having a true large group plan - large group plans tend to be less expensive than individual policies. The government could bid the policies out in increments of 1,000,000 randomly selected people (selected by the last 4 digits of their social security number) so that each group is essentially identical. The policies would then be purchased by the government on the citizens behalf from private insurers with a savings of approximately $3,160 a year when compared to what the government already spends on freebe health care. That savings could result in a lower tax rate, or a tax rebate, or maybe even a credit into a HSA that the citizen could then use to cover his/her deductable. With the HSA option, A worse case senerio would result in an out of pocket expense of no more than $1,840for an individual.
I have been accused of being for socialized medicine because of my plan, but my plan actually reduces government involvement with the health care of individuals. It would simply be collective barganing for the lowest possible insurance rate. No new taxes, not a penny, would be needed. Private health care insurance companies would be administering the plan, each citizen would have the choice of what private health care facility that they went to and what treatments they recieved. The burdon of providing insurance to employees would be removed from the employer, freeing up a small fortune for the employer to spend how he sees fit (raise for the employees, or to hire more employees, or just to increase bottom line profitability). And every American would automatically have an identical plan, and if they choose to purchase some sort of supplimental insurance that they individually negotiate for, then they are welcome to do that.