Just my $.02…

One question I have is what incentive would there be for any companies to give better rates to a bunch of PWD? I mean, obviously, we’re going to use their products – a lot of us rely on them just to survive – so, what would stop them from raising prices on us? Some measure of government intervention would be necessary, wouldn’t it?

I couldn’t agree with you more on the current entitlement programs. In fact, I strongly believe that Americans would be more inclined to make charitable donations if we weren’t being robbed of a significant portion of our paychecks to fund the existing entitlement programs.

I also agree with what you wrote about the FDA. I have a sister who is battling Stage IV breast cancer. There are drugs in R&D that could (possibly) help her, but the process of FDA approval is just ridiculous. I’ve added Healing our World to my purchase list.

Thanks again for contributing – I love reading others’ views, and you’ve given me lots to think about.

In addition to making people believe that the provision of healthcare at little or no personal expense is a “right”, government-run and -regulated entitlement programs result in significant amounts of waste, raise costs, and prevent appropriate medical care from getting to the people who really need it.

Less regulation and less government intervention will lower costs to the point where basic healthcare is (more) affordable, and local private charities often do more to get care to the people who need it than huge government agencies.

The FDA also needs a huge overhaul, or better, privatization. Right now the approval of new drugs is dependent on how much a company can bribe the FDA, and the process is spotty at best. Under today’s regulations, aspirin would never be approved, and the long approval times make drug development so expensive that anything new has to be marketed at huge markups (and advertisement is needed to make people believe they need the new expensive drugs rather than the older cheap drugs). In novel categories, the long lead times mean that more people are actually DYING waiting for the drugs than would have died from adverse reactions to, and side effects of, those drugs. (Read Mary Ruwart, Healing Our World.)

There’s a difference between health insurance (meant to cover catastrophic and unforseeable medical expenses — what we used to call “Major Medical”) and health maintenance (meant to use collective bargaining and economies of scale to lower the cost of routine and ongoing medical expenses, including the costs of managing chronic diseases such as diabetes). What our employers are purchasing for us is an omnibus that covers both insurance and maintenance. Requiring a “clean bill of health” for certain levels of medical insurance makes sense, as does a sliding scale for health maintenance, based on expected needs and costs. (It is not “fair” for someone with no chronic medical conditions to pay for your insulin, pump supplies, test strips, and/or CGM sensors; however, if 1000 PWD get together and can bargain Sanofi-Aventis, J&J, and/or Dexcom into giving you better rates, that is fair.)

It may be that the sooner we re-decouple major-medical insurance from health-maintenance, and the sooner we decouple both from employment and government regulation, the better we will all be.