[Matt8355]

Every week I see an article or news special about health insurance not being affordable. I'm not familiar with the health insurance industry so don't laugh if I ask or say any dumb questions/statements. Why is health insurance unaffordable? Why are healthcare prices increasing to the point that many middle class families are filing for bankruptcy?

I know that a reason for the increase are frivolous lawsuits. Is that the only reason? I'm also not familiar with law in that industry. Can someone start a health insurance company and provide their own policies that state: any person using this policy cannot sue any doctor within the network for more than $XXX,XXX amount and the company will provide "quality" doctors? The health insurance company would also be an insurance carrier for the doctors. That way everyone could afford health insurance. All costs could be calculated and everyone could afford insurance.

Am I forgeting anything? Is that legal? I doubt it but someone fill me in.

[mediad]

The problem with the health care industry isn't in the insurance, it's in the hospitals and drug companies.

You would first have to convince hospitals to stop charging 25 bucks for a box of tissue or 10 bucks for a tooth brush before you could offer "affordable" insurance. Another problem is all the red tape from the government. There are so many rules and regulations (not that regulations are bad) that it's hard to run a hospital and be profitable without charging insane amounts of money for a tooth brush.

All the expenses from the hospital of course trickle down to the insurance companies since they are the ones that usually foot the bill.

A personal example of stupidly expensive medical costs. Last year I had what I thought was a nasty run in with some food poisoning and ended up going to the doctor. After not getting better after a week he ran some x-rays and did some blood work then decided I had GERD and stuck me on Previcid. The x-rays cost me $260.00 to get the x-rays and another $250.00 to have them read, the blood work cost me close to $600.00, each of the 4 doctors visits cost $79.00 a visit, the Previcid was $160.00 for a months supply.

Now, it turns out that my mom has a gall bladder that doesn't work very well and most likely a genetic "problem" just manifested itself and my gall bladder doesn't work very well either. So basically all of that expense was moot, cause the doctor was way off base with his diagnosis, but it still cost me close to $1500.00.

Another example would be when my dad had a heart attack(s)

1st time they put in a stent which immediatly failed so they had to redo it. That was to the tune of $75,000.00

2nd time the stent failed again so they redid it to the tune of around $35,000.00

3rd time the stent failed again so they did open heart surgery to the tune of close to $100,000.00

The bad thing was, looking over the hospital bills, most of the expense was from the hospital rooms and all the "stuff", not the payment to the actual doctors.

[mpnetwork]

I'm Canadian, eh, so I'm not particularly familiar with the issue. I do remember coming across this link though:

http://www.sickoflawsuits.org/conten...m/patients.cfm

.

Limiting unreasonable jury awards could cut healthcare costs by 5-9 percent

While 5-9 percent is a significant (potential) reduction, premiums have increase far more than that in recent years.

Even though frivolous lawsuits might be contributing to the problem, there has to be other, more significant, influences to account for the major increases in health insurance premiums