Dean Moss wrote a post about his viewpoint on health-care. It was quite a heated response full of passion from several varying positions on health care reform ideas. My comment was very long and I did not want to hijack his post so I am writing my response to some of the issues he brought up in his post and to respond to many of the comments. 
This post is not about being Democrat or Republican. This is not a political issue; this is an American issue. This is not about whose side you are on or who you voted for. I am going to very upfront here and say that neither side has it right, nor has had it right for a long time. The two parties are more alike than they are different. I am going to address the things that are not in the health care reform that need to be.
There were a few things that really stood out in the comment section of Dean's post:
Many people see insurance not for what insurance was meant to be for but rather for something entirely different. There are a few reasons that insurance is so high outside of the obvious and one of those reasons is that people have come to view insurance as the way to pay for their regular health care, check ups and such.
Lenn Harley made one of the most important and relative comments that even at her age she pays as she goes. She keeps herself healthy and eats right and exercises.
Think about your car insurance. You don't get to go and get your oil changes, your transmission flushes and your tires rotated and changed with your car insurance. That is not included in your car insurance premiums. The same thing should go for health insurance. We are self pay patients and we get some awesome deals for being self pay. Nestor broke his leg a couple of years ago. The total bill for his cast, his x-rays, his ortho specialist and everything was $695 for self pay. I thought that was an awesome deal. For insured people that price would have been over $3200 and that is what the office bookkeeper told us.
I know moms who run to the doctor every time their children get a sniffle or a slight fever. I know people who are addicted to going to the doctor. I know people who go to the doctor every month because they have allergies and never once do they get told why they really have allergies. Why? It is easy for them to go because they have such low co-pays. Insurance is for emergencies, real emergencies! If people would treat insurance this way, it would be much cheaper. We have catastrophe insurance.
The best way to keep health care costs down is through prevention. Prevention is rarely covered in insurance and certainly is not included in government health care. Chiropractic routine care has helped our health and so has acupuncture and massage. Our chiropractor is also an acupuncturist and he has a massage therapist in his office. We have a one time family plan annual fee we pay to him and that includes unlimited visits by all our family members. This preventive care keeps our nerves and bones healthy and strong and relieves stress. Chiropractic treatments even prevent ear infections in babies and allergies in children and adults.
We go to a homeopathic doctor and get natural herbal treatments instead of spending money on prescription drugs. This of course, would not work if we ate fast food. We do not smoke, we do not drink alcohol and we do not eat any foods with preservatives or added chemicals. We do not eat any dairy because casein is a precursor of cancer big time. We don't use any toxic cleaners or chemicals in our home and don't have carpet or any other products with formaldehyde. We clean with vinegar, baking soda, lemon and borax.
It comes down to a matter of choice. Do you choose to eat whatever you want and drink whatever you want, playing russian roulette with your health? You can choose to drive your own health care costs down. Now if I do ever get cancer no insurance company would pay for the natural treatments that I would wish to take. The reason they use Chemo is because there is so much money in Chemo and related products.
The government, no matter which party is in office sleeps in bed with Big Pharma and Insurance companies and most of all Trial Lawyers. Do you ever wonder why the directors of the FDA when they retire get cushy million dollar plus jobs at Big Pharma companies and Monsonto operations? Hmmm, when government and big business sleep together, that is the destruction of capitalism and free markets. You have to look beneath the arguments.
Tort Reform is the next thing that needs to happen. I am no fan of Howard Dean, but last night I became one! He had the nerve to speak the truth. When he was asked why tort reform was not in the bill at his town hall; he answered truthfully and with real transparency- because the trial lawyers won't let it be in the bill. They would tie up that bill in litigation and on and on. Howard Dean had the guts to tell the truth and for that he deserves a lot of credit.
Tort reform should include caps on law suits and loser pay rules. It should also include specific punishments for bad doctors and reward good doctors with reduced malpractice rates.
My Ob/Gyn almost had to shut her doors. She was being charged over $250,000 a year for malpractise insurance. She canceled her insurance and hung up her disclosures that she no longer had insurance so if you want to sue her; you won't get much. She has been my doctor for 15 years. She delivered my son and my two grandchildren. It is so sad how the quality of the birthing experience has declined so much since the birth of my first 5 children to the last child, my 6th child.
As I was having my first 5 children a woman's right to have her baby in a natural setting improved a lot. When I gave birth to my youngest daughter 20 years ago; I had the choice of no monitor on me, walking around the halls, taking baths, no IV and they even had a video set up that if we chose I could film the birth, which I did. Then fast forward 14 years and I am having my last baby 7 years ago. I asked where the video set up was, oh, because of law suits there are no more videos of live births. You have to be hooked up to the IV, you have to have the monitor on you and you have to have a c-section if you show any complications. Why, because of law suits! It has all gone down hill since those years when I had my first babies.
We have our regular medical doctor who no longer even takes insurance of any kind. He scaled down his practice and works only with self pay clients. He charges a yearly family fee and even makes house calls in that fee. Why? Because there are less law suits among self payers.
One of the best comments I read was about the matter of choice. Choosing to be a Realtor is a choice. When you start your real estate business it is a business not a job. Therefore you have overhead. That overhead should include a medical savings plan for yourself and your family. You know going into this business that you don't have health insurance. There are benefits to having a real estate business and that is the unlimited income earning. There is no income ceiling in real estate. So it is up to you to make more money to pay for your catastrophe insurance or medical savings plan and it should be a part of your business plan. If you do the math; you will see that saving on your own time, on your own free will and choosing how to use your medical savings is empowering you and actually will improve your health since 95% of all illness starts upstairs. That will drive the prices of insurance down because the demand will go down.
You see, we go back to supply and demand. If you allow the market to work and empower people to have access to prevention and alternative health-care - you will decrease the demand, thereby reducing the cost.
But of course; since this makes sense so no one in Washington is going to take these ideas and run with them.
Nestor Gasset and Katerina Gasset- Realtors®, CIPS, ABR, SFR, GRI, REOS
International Properties & Investments, Inc
Call us today at 561-753-0135 to get your house sold.
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Hmmmm something to ponder upon....