After reading the letters to the editor about health care, I’m convinced that many want to help pay for my health care. This may be facetious, but most of us do need help with the health care bills the cost of which has risen from the ten-dollar office call and twenty-dollar hospital room to hundreds for the office call and thousands for the hospital. With all of the action and reaction in Congress to this matter, there seems to be no effort to lower costs but to just try to find the best plan to subsidize our cost.
The unaffordable cost rise has been caused by many events, from technology to new facilities, but the greatest cause has been government intervention and subsidies by both insurance companies and government Medicare and Medicaid plans. Three government causes are 1) The cost of education: When the feds started guaranteeing education loans, the colleges and universities were able to raise their tuition at alarming rates. A medical education puts the future doctor so far in debt that their only choice of practice is to specialize. They can’t afford to be family practice physicians and work in a small town, 2) A few years ago a doctor could treat a macular degeneration patient monthly for about two hundred dollars using an older drug. A drug company reformulated and repackaged the same drug, and Medicare will only pay for its use at about twenty-one hundred dollars. This is a bit greater than the recent EpiPen. We did not hear about it because Medicare paid for it and not an individual, and 3) Recently my doctor’s office calls have risen in cost about thirty percent due to an additional “Facility Fee,” which was given to hospitals that hired their own doctors by the Medicare system. It was part of the Affordable Care Act. This is just three elevations of cost brought to us by the lobbying efforts of the health care and pharmaceutical operators. As long as government is involved, we are subject to politicians who work harder for the lobbyists who pay for their re-election than they do for us.
The action in Washington is about the best way to subsidize our health care. Should it be more government or less government? With government, it may be cheaper for some but much more expensive for many others based on income. The more you make or the older you are, the more you will pay and with the health care industry still open to the lobbyists the cost will still rise at a faster rate. Less government will raise costs for everyone temporarily but stop the rapid growth in the cost of health care. People are not going to die with either plan as the alarmists are saying, and if you think otherwise I suggest that you visit an emergency room or our Health Right free clinic downtown. Many people are without insurance or a government plan, and they are receiving help when they need it. It is apparent that many people believe that their right to health care should be paid by someone else. I would ask everyone reading this letter to name the people who should pay for their respective health care and guarantee their right to it.