You know what just kills me? People screaming about Washington bureaucrats making medical decisions for them (when nothing could be further from the truth) while they completely ignore the fact that someone with a high school diploma sitting behind a computer screen that has absolutely no medical training or education at all is already doing that. They are called insurance company employees. Insurance companies decide every day whether or not they think a person should have a medical procedure, they tell you whether or not you can see a specialist, they decide how much they will pay for a procedure no matter what the actual fee is, they second guess doctors’ diagnoses and treatment plans and decide whether the doctor can treat you in the way that he feels is best for your health, they refuse to cover anything they consider to be a “pre-exisiting condition”, they refuse to pay for procedures that were medically necessary, and they tell you what doctor you can and cannot see. And the whole purpose of it is to do nothing more than increase profits for the big insurance companies. These people have already turned all of their decisions over to an insurance executive that is concerned about only one thing…how much profit their company will make this year, and how they can refuse to pay for necessary treatment in order to increase those profits. Insurance companies can refuse to insure any person they choose to. They can charge you exhorbitant fees for insurance. The vast majority of people pay more in premiums during their lifetime than they would ever pay for medical care. They drive up costs by only paying a percentage of their allowable, not a percentage of the actual fee. Doctors, by and large, have to eat those differences, and then raise their rates to make up for it. Insurance companies are the ones that have Americans by the balls. That is exactly why they are lobbying against health care reform. Reform will take control away from them. They will no longer be able to deny care for a pre-existing condition. Because all Americans will be insured, doctors and hospitals will no longer have to write off millions of dollars every year for providing care to the uninsured, or those insured under HMOs or PPOs that pay a small percentage of costs, and leave the doctor and the hospital to count the rest as a loss.
People just don’t think things all the way through. They don’t bother to even read their insurance policies. They turn a blind eye to the fact that insurance company employees dictate what medical care they can and cannot receive. It’s completely absurd.