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As long as the ones costing a lot are the very sick ones.
It's not so bad that very ill people make up a lot of the health care costs but that plenty of perfectly healthy people get health care and don't pay for it.
Anyone should be able to pay for check up and screening tests if they want them, or pay for minor care for something like sore throats, pregnancy care and so on.
95% of patients who went to a doctor this year would be just as well off if they hadn't seen one. So maybe health care for healthy people is where the waste of dollars lies.
You should see the late night ER patients complaining of back pain. Many of them are drug addicts looking for a taxpayer paid high. Those are the ones the system should crack down on, no pun intended.
On terms of the national level: 5% of patients account for 50% of all health care costs.
Um, if you think about this logically, I fully expected to see this.
Most people have no real healthcare costs on a yearly basis.
Some will break a leg or need some sort of surgery etc.
Then there will be a tiny amount with serious serious issues like $1million in costs following a bad accident or hundreds of thousands for surgeries and cancer treatments.
It's really not that much different than other types of insurance.
For example, I've not had a homeowners insurance claim in 20 years....which is fairly typical. However, one neighbor had 100k in fire damage last year.
Think about all of your friends and family and their auto insurance, 5% probably have most of the costs in any given year.
As long as the ones costing a lot are the very sick ones.
It's not so bad that very ill people make up a lot of the health care costs but that plenty of perfectly healthy people get health care and don't pay for it.
Anyone should be able to pay for check up and screening tests if they want them, or pay for minor care for something like sore throats, pregnancy care and so on.
95% of patients who went to a doctor this year would be just as well off if they hadn't seen one. So maybe health care for healthy people is where the waste of dollars lies.
Yes, the 1% of patients that keep going to the ER are very sick people that have chronic illnesses. One of the patients interviewed simply could not fathom how doctors and hospitals charged so much money for his care when he still felt so terrible.
After noticing this, Dr. Brenner set up a clinic to treat underserved populations within Camden that needed treatment for chronic illnesses. The results were an astounding success, not only did the city start saving a lot of money, the patients who where constantly in the ER stopped going all of the time and actually had better outcomes once they started receiving preventative care.
Such is a microcosm of the entire problem in the US. Rather than allow everyone to have access to cheaper preventative care we continue to deny, deny, deny, until people become extremely sick, clog up ERs, and use medical care that is many times more expensive than simple preventative care (which usually has better outcomes too).
Once you learn how to scam the system, it becomes a game.
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