This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Knowledge & Support Community

To say that medical care is screwed up in the USA is an understatement.

What most do not know is that our current practice of employer provided medical health care coverage started during WWII. At that time, employers were under strict war time rationing and wage and price controls. FDR did this to constrain inflation and to allocate resources to the war effort.

There was a huge shortage of labor as the war expanded and men (and women-my mom was a WAVE!) were put into the military.

Offering free health care as a job benefit was a way of circuit-venting the wage caps.

This morphed into an employer-insurance company combination that wasn't designed for the end user but rather as a cost factor in doing business. Add Medicare in 1965 and you imposed a whole new layer of
bureaucracy to the mess.

Whether you have "free" medical care or the mess here in the states, at the most basic level there are costs. The hospitals, doctors, nurses, drugs, etc. all have their expenses and somehow someone has to pay for them.

What the best way to handle all the competing factors is a huge problem, and I do not think what we have here in the States really leaves any of the stakeholders happy with the results. High medical costs are the reason for nearly half of all bankruptcy cases, for example. Yet the medical people are doing a great job and certainly deserve to be paid fairly for their efforts.

The solution????

Donnchadh

I think newer numbers say over 60%!!!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/05/ba ... cal.bills/

I don't have an answer for the health care problems in the US and Canada.

TORONTO (Reuters) – Pressured by an aging population and the need to rein in budget deficits, Canada's provinces are taking tough measures to curb healthcare costs, a trend that could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100531/hl_nm/us_health_3

The article mentions that 40% of Canada's provinces budgets go toward health care. It predicts an increase to 70% of province budgets going to health care within 13 years if something isn't done.

Who knows what the US health care system will look like in a couple of years? Our government screws up more things than it fixes.

If CCSVI diagnosis and treatment is shown to be less expensive and as effective as the current expensive, and not very effective disease modifying drugs, Liberation could be the ms treatment of choice, for economic reasons, alone.

Brian

bretzke wrote: snip

If CCSVI diagnosis and treatment is shown to be less expensive and as effective as the current expensive, and not very effective disease modifying drugs, Liberation could be the ms treatment of choice, for economic reasons, alone.

Brian

The cost savings angle MIGHT be the best way to get CCSVI treatments supported. And that doesn't even include the societal costs of non-productive disabled people.

Donnchadh