Is Health Care Reform "Rocket Science"?

It's called the Free Lunch. People want more quantity and quality of something, but don't want to pay the costs of doing so. Politicians, of course, specialize in telling you that they can suspend the laws of economics and provide more of scarce resources to you with the cost born by "someone else".

it is not a mystery but a can of worms.

In a regular market, you have a seller who provides the service and receives the money, and the customer who pays the money and receives the service. If customer does not like the service, he does not pay. If seller provides the service, he gets paid.

In healthcare, patient receives the service, doctor provides it, insurance company pays the money and hospital receives the money. Due to this, you can have insurance company denying treatment to save money, or hospitals forcing unnecessary procedures onto patients.

On top of that, you have people who could afford health insurance, but choose to spend their money in unhealthy ways, and when they get sick they go to emergency room which costs 10 times the insurance.

And you have the little ethical dillemma about half the healthcare spending going to people in the last two years of their life.

It makes rocket science look easy. Fee for service has incentive for doctors to do to mush, HMOs to little, insurance companies to only insure healthy people, sick people buy more insurance, insured people to ask for too much care and ignore cost, AND cost of heath care getting so expensive that half or the population can not afford insurance but with most voters believing that everyone should get health care when they are really sick however do not want to pay taxes to pay for other peoples care..

The mystique is that insurance companies don't want competition. Blue Cross wants $1,100 a month and if I get sick, they have the right to cancel the policy.