Sunday, March 25, 2007
Coverage of Lab Tests
I want to know: how much money is wasted billing people, whose medical insurance is from company X, for lab tests because health care practitioners, covered by insurance company X, do not or will not send those tests to a lab covered by insurance company X? It seems to me in the quest to save money by denying claims, etc., insurance companies, health care providers, et al., are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
T. Roosevelt challenged Taft (the substance of this challenge being much under-appreciated with everyone focusing on the progressive/conservative split and only occassionally noting the substance of the challenge simply as something "ironic" ... kinda like rain on your wedding day, I reckon ... if ya know what I mean ...) because he realized that competition only works to increase efficiency if there are innovations that can increase efficiency beyond the point where time and money are wasted by having to make choices between competitors, having to juggle paperwork and billing by multiple payers, etc. In other cases, monopolies or even government ownership is more efficient. So how come, as with most things, so-called conservatives, the first people who should worry about the costs of a system, only seem to see benefits in competition and do not look into the costs our supposedly competitive system is injecting into, e.g., our health care bills.
The health care system is this country is beyond being broken. All of those horror stories you hear about socialized medicine seem to be even more true for non-socialized medicine. So how come we cannot even muster the political will to even make some reforms in the right direction in our system? Of course, it doesn't help that some of the people most favoring reforms don't even know their history (regarding the update on the linked post -- if you want to discuss that, can you please do it here so that way I'll be more likely to note any much appreciated fashion advice I'm receiving in the comments?).
T. Roosevelt challenged Taft (the substance of this challenge being much under-appreciated with everyone focusing on the progressive/conservative split and only occassionally noting the substance of the challenge simply as something "ironic" ... kinda like rain on your wedding day, I reckon ... if ya know what I mean ...) because he realized that competition only works to increase efficiency if there are innovations that can increase efficiency beyond the point where time and money are wasted by having to make choices between competitors, having to juggle paperwork and billing by multiple payers, etc. In other cases, monopolies or even government ownership is more efficient. So how come, as with most things, so-called conservatives, the first people who should worry about the costs of a system, only seem to see benefits in competition and do not look into the costs our supposedly competitive system is injecting into, e.g., our health care bills.
The health care system is this country is beyond being broken. All of those horror stories you hear about socialized medicine seem to be even more true for non-socialized medicine. So how come we cannot even muster the political will to even make some reforms in the right direction in our system? Of course, it doesn't help that some of the people most favoring reforms don't even know their history (regarding the update on the linked post -- if you want to discuss that, can you please do it here so that way I'll be more likely to note any much appreciated fashion advice I'm receiving in the comments?).
# posted by alberich @ 5:40 PM 
