NZBC

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Private health? What a crock!

One of the pet projects of the right is to make sure you can only get healthcare if you can afford it. They argue the private sector can give better service and wastes less money on needless bureaucracy. Well check this out from the NY Times. Apparently 30 per cent of every dollar spent on health in the US goes to administration ("administration" is the private sector word for bureaucracy).

But become a patient, and you enter a world of paperwork so surreal that it belongs in one of Kafka's tales of the triumph of faceless bureaucracies. And although some insurers and hospitals are trying to streamline and simplify bills, the efforts have been piecemeal.
Medical paperwork is a world of co-payments and co-insurers, deductibles, exclusions and contracted fees. Nothing is as it seems: patients receive statements that often do not reflect what is actually owed; telephone calls to customer service agents are at best time-consuming and at worst fruitless. The explanations of benefits that insurers send out - known as E.O.B.'s - are filled with unintelligible codes.

The right also says the private sector provides more choice. Well, not in the US:

Dr. Brailer said he often used an analogy to describe the current state of medical billing.
"Suppose you walk into a restaurant," he said, "and you don't get a menu, you don't get any choice of what food you'll eat, they don't tell you what it is when they're serving it to you, they don't tell you what it's going to cost."
"Then, weeks or months later, you get a bill that tells you all the food you ate and the drinks you had, some of which you remember and some you don't, and although you get the bill, you still can't figure out what you really owe," Dr. Brailer said.

Sure sounds like free market heaven to me! I think keeping these barbarians away from our public health system is the strongest single reason why I'm happy the centre-left won.

3 Comments:

Antarctic Lemur said...: Gee.

(1) This Labour government prevents people from entering the waiting lists so that it can "honestly" claim in press releases the waiting lists have declined or stablised. The media refuses to treat this scam as the scandal it is.
(2) Even when you get on a waiting list, you can die before receiving appropriate treatment.

And you're citing a NY Times article featuring near nil statistics but many opinions as evidence private healthcare is 'a crock'.

I know of New Zealanders who used private health insurance to avoid the ridiculous system in this country. If they hadn't taken that route they would have been in agony or discomfort for many more months than necessary.

I know of foreigners (foreign exchange students and workers on visas) who used their private health insurance to receive far better treatment than many NZers get in public hospitals. These same visiting workers, by the way, pay the same tax rates as the rest of us but do not benefit from our public "health" system.; 11:13 PM
Rob O'Neill said...: Nice anecdotal response AL.; 11:49 AM
kiwijohn said...: Would some enlightened person tell me how many New Zealanders die while on a waiting list for treatment of their specific disease and how many die while on another waiting list or NONE AT ALL.
Ta; 7:16 PM