Raising the Overall Cost of Medical Care

[MineralMan]

My wife's sister has a strapping 14-year-old son. Her husband is an abject moron. They have health insurance through MinnesotaCare, Minnesota's Medicaid system. The Moron brother-in-law is always talking about what good "health insurance" they have and how little it costs. He hates "soshalized medcine," though. That's OK. They're struggling financially, and I'm glad they have it. But, something I've noticed about how they use this is a little disturbing.

At the least sniffle, off they go to the Emergency Room. All of them. They neglect the big things, like my b-i-l's morbid obesity, and my sister almost lost her arm once with a raging infection and abscess. But a sore throat or a bout of diarrhea from eating too much greasy crap, and it's off the the emergency room.

It's not just them, though, and I don't want to single them out, especially. Emergency Rooms get tons of people who walk in with very minor, self-limiting illnesses. Those illnesses clog up the places and cause huge delays, especially in cities like St. Paul.

Where is the basic health education? Where is the guide to when to see a doctor and when to give it a day or two to see if you're really sick or are having one of your three annual colds? Is nobody teaching this kind of thing any more? Does every sniffle or bruise require a trip to the Emergency Room?

Maybe there's an educational initiative that can be started that teaches this kind of thing. It would go a long way toward saving tons of money and making actually needed medical care a lot easier to get.

What do you think?

[Hoyt]

1. Agree with you totally. But people will gripe and call it rationing.

Truth is, if we really want affordable care, we have to accept some changes.

Recently, there was a thread here griping about chronic disease management. Well, we need a lot more coordination of care and disease management to make the system affordable. We probably need some rationing by limiting tests and services that are only of benefit to providers.

With all that said, I'd prefer all that to be managed by government than greedy for-profit corporations.

[L0oniX]

2. The medical and insurance systems are f*cking vampires.

Their reasoning is so f*cked up. "We have to charge more because the gov is forcing us to treat people who have no money". It turns a 8k bill into a 45k bill ...as with my wife with 3 nights in a hospital. Her insurance at the time negotiated the price down to 8k. If she had not had insurance at the time we would have ended up with the 45k bill ....the the damned vampires never found out what was wrong with her! F*cking thieves!

[DCKit]

3. Yes, the system needs to be seriously reformed. The Teahadii and GOP would end all forms...

of socialized medicine, and every other safety net.

My Teabagging sister, a nurse, wants people to go without access. It's all black and white with those folks.