You may be wondering why I want to tackle healthcare on a personal finance blog, but healthcare is the number one cause of financial ruin in America, so I feel that it’s relevant.
There is a simple two syllable reason as to why healthcare is broken in America.
Pro·fit
The one thing that I hold dearest to my heart is the one reason why healthcare will never be fixed in America. It’s the thirst for profit that has driven the cost of everything up.
Healthcare companies are in business of making money. You have insurance companies on the stock market, where the only thing that matters is your quarterly profit.
The sole purpose of profit is to maximize your revenues while decreasing costs. In healthcare, this means denying claims and treating only the sick instead of trying to prevent people from getting sick in the first place.
This holds true for our food supply, where everything has gotten cheaper and much less healthy, but that’s another post.
Getting rid of the profit
There’s been a lot of talk of a public option for health insurance. While I don’t think that this goes far enough — I believe in totally socialized medicine — it can at least help reduce the pressures that are put onto healthcare to maximize earnings.
A public option would ensure that everyone was insured, regardless of preexisting condition. Overall it will increase all of our costs, as someone will have to pay for the subsidies, but everyone will be covered.
There’s a public option for flood insurance
A health insurance public option isn’t a new concept. The flood insurance industry only exists in America because there’s a public option. If there wasn’t a public flood insurance option, millions of Americans would be forced to relocate to places
Of course, having a public option is really just a finger in the dam trying to hold back the water. The only real way to solve the problem is through a total socialization of healthcare.
