Sanders Wants to Negate Student Debt..

[idhawkman]

It would be nice to hang on to some of our perks, while improving some of our negatives one of them being affordability. I'd like to explore some methods to get that done. Obamacare was one attempt. It was pretty poor, but it tried. Unfortunately Obamacare overestimated the willingness of private insurance to provide affordable healthcare to the working and middle class. My buddy tried going through their exchanges and couldn't find a reasonable priced option. He was paying $600 a month for bare minimum coverage when his contract company was providing much better insurance prior to Obamacare for a much lower price. He was pretty unhappy. It seemed to work only for the subsidized or fairly well off, but put the squeeze on middle income folks who didn't get insurance from their job.

We'll see. I'm open to other ways of doing things. I'm hoping that venture with Buffett, Bezos, and Dimon can come up with a better way to get it done. I like things like that Rx Card Riverdog was mentioning. That is a good option if you can use the right pharmacies.

Three things could be done immediately to deflate medical costs but there would be huge implications to the economy if you take the money out of medical so it has to be done slowly. Here's the three things and why.

1. Tort reform. In the U.S. you go through huge amounts of tests and checks and other things that are unnecessary but the doctors and hospitals have to cover their butts from law suits so they run exhaustive tests and procedures in order to "show" they did everything they could. Last I checked, doctors are human and will make mistakes and people are entitled to normal compensation. That's not what's happening though. With these outrageous settlements the cost for malpractice, errors and omissions insurance gets passed on to the patients. Since medicaid and medicare have fixed lower costs, guess who pays for that bill?

2. Open insurance and costs. Whoever came up with (insurance companies) the idea that insurance is sold on a state by state basis was trying to inflate costs based on ability to pay. Higher income states get charged higher rates and lower income states get charged less. Eliminating this false line in the sand would allow people to shop for the best insurance rates in the country. Combine that with the publishing of doctors, hospitals, anesthesiologists, etc costs and allow people to shop around for the best provider at the best cost would greatly reduce the costs of healthcare across the board. You never see a sale on a medical procedure because they don't have to do them in order to attract more business. The only procedure that I know of that does do this is Lasiks Eye surgery which has driven the cost of that procedure way down.

3. Student Loan reform. Doctors have like 12 years of college they have to complete before becoming a full blown doctor. The ease of getting student loans has driven the costs of Universities way through the roof. Something huge has to be done to reign in the runaway costs of college for everyone but especially doctors. They have to pay those loans off and so guess who gets to pay higher fees for them to be able to pay those bills? yep, the patients.

"IF" we took these three steps as a nation, I think you would see health care costs cut to a fraction of what they are today.

[idhawkman]

Costco has a decent prescription drug program available, too, even for pets. The wife once found a HUGE difference in a drug she was taking, over $100 at WalMart (which you would think would be low cost) and under $10 at Costco.

https://www.costco.com/member-prescription-program.html

It really pays to shop around. Safeway with a GoodRx card might be the cheapest on one specific drug while Albertson's with insurance might have a better price on the same drug 3 months later., which I think is part of the problem. People accept the price that their insurance and pharmacy gives them as being the lowest cost. The other problem is access. I live in a metro area of about 300K. People living in small, isolated communities don't have as many pharmacies to choose from as I do.

The other thing is that ALL major drug companies have cost reduction programs available on their Tier 3 drugs, the most expensive, for low income folks that can offer substantial savings, but many people are unaware of them or don't want to bother to fill out the paper work. And there's advocacy groups out there that will assist in helping find the best option, fill out paperwork, etc. Even doctor's offices have been known to offer their assistance.

I am certain that there are better ways to manage our health care system. But I do NOT want to go to another country's model and assume that it would apply to ours as the results could be disastrous, and if we were to go to something else and it didn't work out, the government never abolishes a program and starts over.

I literally cringed in last night's Democratic debates (that my wife insisted on watching) listening to candidate after candidate attack big business, drug companies, wealthy people, and so on, as if they are the root of all evil. Lord help us if they are ever put in charge of our health care system.

I concur with River that the GoodRX app for your smart phone will tell you the best price for any drug within your driving area. My dad had a heart attack last year and when we went to get the 3 drugs they prescribed Good RX sent us to two different places. Total cost was about $100 for all three prescriptions but if we had gone to Walmart or Costco one drug alone was $454. I can't say enough good things about GoodRX and encourage anyone that reads this to download that app. You might drive an extra mile or two to get your drugs but it could literally save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars and when talking that amount, it could save your life (thinking of fixed income people who are just struggling to get by and might not be able to eat or cut their prescriptions in half in order to make ends meet).