On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>> From what I read, there are three, maybe four main factors cited to be
>> responsible for that inflation:
>
> - insufficient insurance by a growing segment of population, which
> causes providers to cover up the losses by charging higher fees - that
> may explain why your individual bill grows exponentially higher, but it
> does not explain the aggregate growth
IIUC, this is the only thing in your list that would explain the jump in the bill I gave as an example: super routine bloodwork. It can't be the adminstrative cost, which is exactly the same or cheaper than it was 20 years ago under the same plan. And it isn't that this is a case of high tech, non-preventive care or something caused by lifestyle issues.
This jump could also be caused by a cut in coverage for preventative care. You indicate that the share of coverage hasn't changed in the aggregate, but that rules out nothing in the individual case. Perhaps there's no profit in complete physicals and they charged me for things they didn't used to. That does seem the first explanation that springs to hand. Cheaper or more expensive, they simply never charged me for these tests before, even though they always did them.
At any rate, if these two are the only possible causes, then in this case the problem would be fixed entirely by single payer. My puzzlement here is precisely how astromical costs have gone up for routine preventative well-care.
Single payer wouldn't fix everything (nothing does). But I don't see anything in your rundown that persuades me it wouldn't fix this.
Michael