How can giving everyone insurance reduce healthcare costs? It sounds crazy, on the face of it. It doesn’t take a genius to understand, despite all the nonsense some people are pulling out of their nether regions.
When you don’t have insurance, what do you do? You don’t go to the doctor. You keep hoping you’ll get better. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you just die. But too many times, you wait too long and then you wind up going to the emergency room. By then, what you have is very serious and it costs a whole lot of money to fix it.
How do I know? Because it happened to me when I was twenty. I got sick but had no insurance. If I had gone to the doctor and been properly diagnosed, it would have costs less than ten dollars a month to treat my disease. Instead, I didn’t go in until I was nearly dead and had to be carried in by friends. I had to spend two days in intensive care and another twelve days in a ward. It cost over twenty thousand dollars, and that was almost thirty years ago. I’m sure it would have cost a lot more now.
I’ve talked to other people who have the same disease I had, which is chronic, and many of them didn’t have insurance. They also couldn’t afford the medicine. So, in one man’s case, he would be back at the hospital every couple of months. He’d use up resources and take up a be for several days before he’d be well enough to leave. He couldn’t hold down a job because of his frequent absence due to his illness. He had to get by with day labor. If he’d had insurance, his disease could have been managed as mine was after my incident in the hospital. I only went into the hospital because of that disease one more time, and that was fifteen years later, and it was to have the offending organ removed.
Treating that poor gentleman probably cost far more than my insurance premiums. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that treating him cost more in a single year than my insurance has cost myself and my employers that whole time.
I suspect that the man I’m refering to is probably dead by now, even though he was the same age as I was. Had he had insurance he could have worked a better job. He would have been a productive member of society. Instead he wound up having a miserable, and probably short, life. If I’d not been very lucky, that could have been me. It could have been you.
My father did some work for a hospital down in Florida. He was a marketing consultant. They asked him about a problem they had. They were a private hospital, but they were the only game in town, and never turned anyone away who needed care. They had just invested in a couple of birthing rooms.
Unfortunately, because of the way the county was zoned, everyone was either VERY rich, or VERY poor. The very poor women in the comunity were coming in with premature labor, underweight sick babies. The hospital often had to use the birthing rooms for these indigent patients. It was costing them a great deal of money.
My father made a simple suggestion: he told them that the best way to solve this problem was to send a van out to the poor part of the county once a week. The nurses in the van sought out pregnant women and taught them about proper diet, excercise, and the need to refrain from drug use. The nurses also handed out pregnancy vitamins and helped the women have full term pregnancies, which resulted in healthier babies.
The hospital was able to go back to charging an arm and a leg for the birthing rooms. The poor women in the community were taken care of and had healthier babies. The van and the nurses cost the hospital some money, but far less than the profits they were losing on the birthing rooms.
Good community healthcare just makes sense and it saves money.
