AARP: Radically Different Talk Needed About Health Care Costs
AARP's position is that health care is not a political issue but an American one, and the American people need to come together to address the problems with health care costs or else no-one will remain unscathed by the runaway train of rising costs.
The latest CBO report indicated that growth in health care costs accounts for approximately 90 percent of the projected growth in federal Medicare and Medicaid spending over the next 75 years. The aging population will account only for approximately 10 percent.
"The health care conversation in this country needs a radical change...Talking about programs while ignoring the costs that drive them is like replacing the roof while the house is burning. Our leaders are focused on federal programs when they should be talking about health care costs -- costs that can be lowered through health IT initiatives, comparative effectiveness research, care coordination, and speeding generic drugs to market," AARP spokesperson Drew Nannis said.
Other critics of the nation's health care system have also said that the mechanics of the system need to be gutted and totally replaced, instead of constantly oiled more by the federal and state governments.
One recent study, funded by drug company giant Pfizer, concluded that one of the costliest factors for Americans with regards to health care is the fact that so many Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to understanding how to ask the right questions and conduct their own research into matters of their own health. This results in doctors feeling obligated to make many referrals or dole out expensive prescriptions or medical examination procedures that, while always very expensive, are very often unnecessary. This impacts insurance companies' rates for the worse.
It has been said that Americans overmedicate themselves as compared to people in any other developed nation.
Other advocates for radical reform of the system say that health insurance should act like other types of insurance, and be used to cover only unexpected, unpredictable, or catastrophic health events while having high deductibles, rather than acting as subsidies and covering nearly everything. Advocates for this approach say that this would lower premiums substantially, freeing up a great amount of cash for Americans to put into an interest-bearing account that they could use to pay for routine or minor health care costs and to pay the deductible if they experienced an insurable event.
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Published by Brant McLaughlin
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