Healthcare is making me sick

By JR Dieckmann

Had enough of this nation's obsession with health lately? Are you tired of seeing actors playing sick people on TV constantly complaining about their aches and pains, then suggesting some miracle cure? It's not enough that the political landscape is currently dominated by issues of healthcare, but we also have to sit through countless TV commercials, especially on Fox News, pushing health food, diet food, health products, and prescription drugs for everything from Diabetes to erectile dysfunction.

We sit and listen while TV spokesmen read the pill bottle label telling us don't do this and don't do that; you may experience this or that; don't take it if you have this condition or that; if this occurs, stop taking it and see your doctor; and on and on it goes. It's enough to make anyone sick just from worrying about whether or not you are going to be suffering from all these illnesses and discomforts that are constantly being thrown in your face.

Do we really need to hear all this medical advice that should be coming from your doctor if he chooses to prescribe some medication for you? Shouldn't decisions about what medication you should be taking be left up to the doctors, not the TV spokesmen? Is it really in people's best interests to have pharmaceutical companies marketing their prescription products directly to the public instead of to the doctors whose job it is to know what is best for their patients?

I am not a doctor, but if I were, I would be getting pretty irritated when patients come in and start telling me what drugs I need to prescribe for their real or imagined condition — because they saw it on TV.

Then, as if we haven't had enough medicine crammed down our throats already, we get these greedy lawyers soliciting for lawsuits against the pharmaceutical and health industries for unintentional mistakes made 20 years ago that have already been addressed and corrected by law. Have you, or someone you know, died from mesothelioma? Let's sue someone! Are you suffering from some newly invented alphabet disease? Don't go to the doctor — call a lawyer! Then, in their lawsuits, they name any and everyone who has money including the U.S. government, ie; the taxpayers.

But there is more to it than just the irritating and constant barrage of medical issues being thrust in our faces day after day. There is the financial cost of this to all of us. Thirty second TV commercials can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when you put all of these commercials together from just one day, we are talking about millions of dollars just in advertising costs per day. And where do you think all of that money is coming from? Ultimately, it is all paid for by our healthcare and insurance premium dollars.

When you purchase a prescription drug, some of that money actually pays for the drug, some of it pays for the packaging, and a good portion of it pays for the advertising. How much money could be saved if we cut out the advertising and just let the doctors do their job?

When you pay your health insurance premium, some of that money actually goes to pay for medical costs — but not necessarily yours, unless you spend a lot of time at the doctor's office or in the hospital. A sizeable portion of that money pays for administration costs and some goes to dividends to the stockholders.

Another sizeable portion goes to pay not only for lawsuit settlements to greedy lawyers, but also to full time legal staffs to defend the insurance companies against them. Then there are the billions of dollars that have to paid by doctors for their own malpractice insurance which is reflected in what they have to charge their patients.

How much money would be saved if our healthcare dollars didn't have to be used to support an army of lawyers who clog up the court dockets with frivolous nonsense? In many cases, insurers never even get to trial but prefer to settle out of court because it's cheaper than sending their attorneys into the courtroom. As a result, billions of dollars are paid out that would never have been won in an actual trial.

Now we have this dishonest congress and president who claim that they want to reduce the costs of health insurance by creating a government health insurance plan to compete with private insurance providers, thereby forcing them to lower their premiums. That is an outrageous lie. Why do we need government to compete with private insurance companies, when we could simply allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines to increase competition among insurance providers?

More competition isn't going to have too much effect on healthcare costs anyway. It's not as though health insurance providers can just arbitrarily fix a price on health insurance. Their premium price reflects their costs and when those costs are not addressed in any healthcare reform, forcing them to lower their premiums would simply put them out of business. If there are no stock dividends, there will be no stock investors, and stock dividends are the only area where insurers could make cuts without rationing services.

Why does this government refuse to address tort reform and either eliminate or strictly limit rewards to lawyers in medical lawsuits, if the goal is to reduce the cost of healthcare? Why allow pharmaceutical companies to market their prescription drugs directly to the public at a cost of billions of dollars added to the price of those drugs?

And finally, why allow lawyers to solicit on TV for money grabs from the healthcare industry? This practice wasn't even legal until about 30 years ago when the law was changed to allow legal services to advertise on TV. There was good reason for the ban on advertising by law firms. Anyone who has a legitimate legal issue can easily seek out a lawyer to help in dealing with it. There is no need for lawyers to solicit clients and encourage frivolous lawsuits that waste the courts' time and money.

There is no shortage of lawyers in this country. In fact there are so many that some can't even find work. Some take other jobs outside of the legal profession — we see lots of them on Fox News and other broadcasters. For those who can't do anything else, they end up in law firms that specialize in creating frivolous lawsuits and soliciting clients to participate in them. The court awards they get are nothing but legalized extortion and theft of money from those who have worked for it. Rather than our government promoting more lawsuits, why not promote fewer lawyers?

Does Obamacare address any of these issues to reduce the cost of healthcare? No, not a one. There is nothing in any healthcare proposal presented by Obama or the Democrats in congress that actually addresses the costs of healthcare. Instead, they attempt to use taxpayers' money to pay for the inflated costs and waste that are systemic in the current healthcare system.

Yes we need healthcare reform, just not the kind of reform that is being offered by the socialists who now control this government. We need reform that actually addresses healthcare costs, not reform that encourages more fraud and expense to the taxpayers without addressing the costs. We need reform that doesn't destroy the private sector healthcare industry. But the last thing we need is for this bunch of incompetents and nincompoops in the government to be dictating policy and payments to healthcare providers.

Would you want to trust your health and your life to the people who run the post office and Amtrak, or who brought you "Cash for Clunkers" — a program that actually cost you more in taxes and debt than it saved?

© JR Dieckmann