Paying for our own Healthcare?

John Stossel (who works for ABC, of all places) put together one of the best segments on the current debate over healthcare and insurance coverage:





Stossel raises a few interesting points:

1) If an insurance carrier covers more things, then people will not really care what those services cost (why would anyone care if one place charged $50 more for a flu shot if he or she is not paying for it anyway?). This then reduces the competitive market and the buying power of the individual.

2) It is impossible to cover more people for more services for less money.

3) Insurance is a safety umbrella to protect against the staggering costs of medical emergencies.

The first two points are the two absolute daggers in idea of a public option that covers everyone will be less expensive to Americans. The phantom number of uninsured people thrown around by the powers that be used to be 46 or 47 million people (now it is 30 or 31 million, depending on the source). How can all of these people be added to insurance coverage that has reduced co-pays, reduced deductibles, and additional services that would be covered?

The average person can likely estimate with pretty good accuracy what college tuition would cost. This is true also for a car or smaller things like a TV or a kitchen appliance. Who outside of an insurance agent or actuary would be able to accurately predict what a physical would cost (both on the low end and on the high end)?

Insurance companies already cover too much which artificially raises insurance premiums. As an aside, I previously had a prescription for taking medication for my persistent heartburn. The medication I was taking, omeprazole, is available over-the-counter, but my insurance was covering all but $5 of the cost. My prescription gave me a course of 30 tablets of 20 mg of the treatment. The final time I was going to pick up my prescription, I found that since my insurance had changed, I would have to cover it out-of-pocket. The pharmacist calculated the cost minus the insurance coverage I previously had and it came to about $75 for the one month course.

My jaw just about dropped. I excused myself from the counter and picked up a box of the same omeprazole (also known as Prilosec), which also has 20 mg of the active drug per tablet. It, at the time, ran for about $35 for 42 days of treatment. I asked the pharmacist if there was any difference between the omeprazole in the bottle that she had on the counter and the omeprazole I had in the box of Prilosec tablets. She told me there was no difference. I asked her why my previous insurer was paying for such a high markup. She shrugged and said that she honestly had no idea. I thanked her for her information and said I would be using the over-the-counter option. I can now get 42 tablets of the same treatment for just over $20.

I remember walking out of the pharmacy that day wondering why the insurance I had covered something that was that unnecessarily expensive. I viewed and still view it as a microcosm for the problems relating to healthcare.

Changes in healthcare and insurance coverage do need to occur, but the current plan is only going to make things worse and more expensive because it is only expanding the existing flaws in healthcare and insurance.