A long time Facebook friend and follower, Rocky Pruitt had the following insight on my “Broken Nose” blog, his insight providing a valuable glimpse into exactly what is wrong with “healthcare” in this country. Here is a link to the blog to which Rocky is responding, in case you hadn’t seen it and what follows is his response:
It’s worse. The person pays the $300 per month, $3,600 in the year and still has a $5,000 deductible and 80% coverage once the deductible is met.
Let’s apply that to a scenario the Rocket Surgeon and Chief claims I would be grateful for. Let’s say I break my nose and need surgical repair. Because I have his glorious insurance policy the price of what I need is $20,000 at a supposedly not for profit major hospital. Given that I have paid $3,600 in premiums, $5,000 in deductible and $3,000 as my 20% portion of the cost above deductible, it means my healthcare expenses for that year are $11,600.
Alternatively, I could have simply gone to my friend Dr. Keith Smith‘s Surgery Center of Oklahoma and paid a total all inclusive price of $1,900 to receive exactly the same quality of health care service. I’m not a mathematician by profession, but I fail to see any calculation that would make me grateful to Mr. Obama for forcing me into an $11,600 expense rather than a $1,900 expense.
What compounds the insanity is that he has now deployed the force of federal law against me to ensure that I can’t have this choice and to ensure that the clearly obscene healthcare pricing is protected. He has used the force of federal law to make certain healthcare remains unaffordable.
The example I used is real. I encourage everyone to read Keith’s blog. It’s one of the best educational resources available about the reality of healthcare.
What Rocky is so keenly pointing out is that so much more money goes into the healthcare black hole than is needed to fix this broken nose and that this carefully constructed trap (the creation of the healthcare cronies and their paid goons in D.C.) is not only not addressed by the Unaffordable Care Act, but is actually enabled and emboldened.
“But wait,” you say! “Paying $11,600 rather than the $20,000, the patient would have been charged is a good deal!” Wrong. This argument is one I would refer to as “downstream of a bad premise.” The $20,000 bill, a completely unjustifiable amount, is precisely what we have come to expect of those in corporate healthcare whose livelihood depends on this abuse. This outrageous amount generated by the hospital crony (the initial act in the scam) must precede the generation of an outrageous bill from the insurance crony. Fear of this type of hospital bill actually creates a market for otherwise prohibitively expensive insurance “coverage,” making the $11,600 spent seem like a good deal.
Rocky’s example is important because it points out that first, the Unaffordable Care Act does not address the cost of health care. Second, his example then logically shows that due to a lack of attention to the root causes for the high amounts charged for health care the “law” necessarily increases the cost of health “insurance.” Who wins here, or cui bono, as Rothbard frequently asked? If you said the big hospitals and the insurance companies, you go to the head of the class.
For some time now, I have had no doubt that the true purpose of government in this country is the creation of a demand for their crony’s products and services that few individuals are willing to buy if left to their own devices. Vast wealth for the well connected is only a federal law away, one mandate around the corner. The money forcibly diverted from individuals’ pockets into the health industry in this country has ended up exactly where those who constructed this scam wanted it to: the pockets of the various corporate healthcare cronies and their lawmaker pals who derive their “commissions” from these acts of theft.
The light of the free market and its rational pricing is having the same effect on this scam as on any other vampire. Very soon I will post a blog about an effort in which I am involved that will likely transform this small beacon of light and hope into “sunshine” on health care pricing, a light from which few if any can escape. The Free Market Medical Association will launch later this spring and will help to bring sanity to health care pricing and quality in this country. I look forward to sharing more about this pivotal effort’s launch and mission.
G. Keith Smith, M.D.
For more information about free markets in health care visit: