June 15, 2009

But there is a minimum minimorum reform that the US health sector needs for a starter.

Sir, being a foreigner living in the US I have thanks God not needed to get too acquainted with its so heatedly debated health sector; and I pray it stays that way. In this respect I cannot really comment much on Clive Crook’s “Medicare for all may be the best cure” June 15, but yet I feel the need to point out something that to me seems to go against any sense of justice, which is that as I have witnessed, the uninsured are often required to pay many times the price insurance companies pay for exactly the same medicine or treatment.

If beer companies compete that is good for beer drinkers and does not affect those who do not drink beer. But in the case of health services it is obvious that many of the cost reductions negotiated by the competing insurance companies, end up expected to be recovered from those uninsured.

If it was in my hand (perhaps it's good that’s not the case) I would put up a prohibition to charge anyone more than 5% to max 20% over the minimum price offered to any insurance company… and then take  health reforms from there. Not doing so forces millions of uninsured who could pay reasonable fees to either swamp free service emergency rooms, or being financially abused.

Is not cost-discrimination against the uninsured a much worse discrimination than many of those other discriminations being protested so loudly?