Decrease The Increase

Four years ago, prior to a two week trip to Colorado, I bought insulin from Canadian via the internet. I committed a crime as this was illegal.

Nonetheless, I would wholeheartedly recommend breaking the law to any U.S. diabetic without health insurance, because vials cost one third the price in Canada compared to the U.S.

Why would vials cost ~1/3rd as much? Huh? Why? In my opinion, the underlying reasons for this price discrepancy are the same that are going to doom any chance for health care reform in the U.S. My prediction: There will be more uninsured Americans in 2012 than in 2008. I guarantee it, provided the same corporate sponsorship and their cash spreading lobbies fund Congressional membership, which it appears will continue. If we leave the existing profit centers of the existing system (doctors, Big Pharma and the health insurance industry) in a position to charge $118.96 for a vial of insulin that I can buy in Canada for $43, or twice as much for blood test strips than I bought in France four years ago, then Obama is doomed to fail.

I am a blogger, and not in a position to understand the workings of all this, but come on, there is no way we are going to provide access to health care to 46 million more Americans unless we also reign in costs. Without this, we'll get nothing.

There was some good news last week, in that the rise in health care costs for CalPERS will only be 3.43% for 2010, instead of the ~6-7% yearly increase over the last decade. Wa-hey! It's nice to see such a dramatic decrease in the increase at the same time a large portion of their members are either laid off, furloughed, or their COLAs have been revoked. While wages stagnate or fall, medical costs continue to rise.

America is the most expensive place in the world to get sick or injured. Of course, that means for those who work in the industry it is the best place in the world to work. It only costs 20% of our GDP to implement, twice the rate of every other developed nation. Then, of course, there are 46,247,133 Merikans who can't afford that care. Under our private health insurance paradigm to keep high risk people out of the insurance pool, how could a publicly funded pool possibly work in parallel with private insurance? Either the public pool will become like the private pools by having to trim benefits and rejecting applicants, or it becomes the dumping ground for high-cost, high-risk people like me that private pools would so gladly enjoy rejecting -- at which point the public pool becomes so fucking expensive to fund through taxes that we the taxpayers will demand we cut back on benefits...which is exactly where we are today.

Doctors et al have taken the route of moving medicine from a profession to a business and a lucrative one at that. In his speech Obama claims that doctors became doctors not for monetary gain but to become healers...he's full of shit. Anyone who's ever sat in an organic chemistry class knows that 85% of them care about one thing only...why their lucrative profit-sharing incentives with MRI/CAT scan test centers and Big Pharma drive their care decisions.

And you are full of shit, my fellow American, if you think for a second that Obama will voluntarily cut himself off from the campaign funding bonanza that is the health care industry, why he cannot seriously address health care costs...the proof of this is already evident with his complete avoidance of any single-payer option.

I'm sorry if you don't have insurance today, sorry! because you won't have it tomorrow, either. If you do have it, I'm sorry if a quarter of your future paycheck will go towards your and your uninsured neighbor's health care costs that will continue to see 5% yearly increases...sorry!