Healthcare 3052
Whole corporations are devoted to one cog in the medicine
engine that cranks out dollars. Before and completely ancillary to actually
treating a person who is sick or injured there is a myriad of business
functions that add their part the ultimate bill that the patient is responsible
for paying. He may be covered in part by some payment source, but he himself
remains the primary responsible party for assuring payment is made.
Situated between the patient and the treatment is an
insurance policy of one type or another. It may be a one of the dozens of
private providers that each has a CEO who is paid a salary and benefits
totaling in the millions of dollars each year. While some such CEOs are in the
low-class compensations scale at $1 or 2 million others are in the $14 to 15
million bracket. Other forms of insurance are the publicly funded programs of
Medicare and Medicaid. One specializes in persons over 65 and the other
specializes in people with incomes below a certain threshold. In all three
types of insurance, there are hundreds of permutations of what is covered, to
what total amount, and under what circumstances the treatment will be paid.
In order for the eligibility to be determined, there are
businesses that specialize in assuring that only eligible persons receive
eligible services, drugs and treatments. Those businesses also have highly paid
executives, and staff expenses that add to the total cost of treating the
person who needs care.
Then at the other end of the treatment odyssey there are the
businesses that serve to collect on the debts incurred by people who received
treatment and did not pay, or whose insurance provided denied payment, etc.
Now within the treatment part of the healthcare system the
Doctors all need a place to do their work, staffs to process the billions of
bits of medical and billing data, and of course insurance with which to be
protected if they make a mistake or just some unfortunate outcome results.
Again the incremental costs are added to the total.
After the fact of medical treatment there is the possibility
that a claim is made for malpractice or injury as the result of just about
anything not being to the expectations of the patient. This adds a cost in lost
time for the Professionals, It makes money for the lawyers who handle the
claims and all together results in a far higher cost of medicine in the States
than anywhere else in the world.
Lastly, every drug, every medical device, every service such
as MRIs are priced at a market level.
That is the price charged is based on what the market will pay, not on
what the item costs. Therefore we get
$800 bags of sterile salt water for IVs, $5 aspirins, etc. A prescription for a
topical cream might cost the patient $200 per month, when it costs a fraction
of that to manufacture.
In the European Union they have been using a system of
medical service delivery where Doctors are salaried employees of the medical
delivery program and no one is paid millions of dollars per year to oversee a
medical corporation that adds more costs than value to the system.
In the year 3052, the cost of all the ancillary services for
the much larger human population will have been removed from the system. When a
person breaks his arm, an x-ray image will be made, a staff Doctor will set the
bone and a technician will immobilize the limb or digit and send the patient on
his way. There will be no need to determine who will pay, or if he deserves to
have his bones set. It will just be done as a matter of course.
Far and away the largest portion of medical services are
routine sniffles, sneezes, cuts and abrasions. Getting those items into the
technician's hands will make it possible for the more serious and complex
instances of massive trauma, genetic diseases, and repairs of deformations to
be treated by a highly educated and experienced Doctor.
While humans will certainly still risk their life and limb
on dangerous and adventurous pastimes, and need emergency repairs, the vast
number of ailments will have been addressed with routine treatments.
Much of the environmental contamination that now lead to
unusual combinations of symptoms that defy diagnosis will have been proven
causative and will have been remediated in that 1,000 years of development.
That which we can only today characterize as correlated causes and their
alleged effects will be definitive as a cause and effect relationship. In that
light we will be able to remove the causes and isolate them.
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