The medical-industrial complex has become a sump of insurance "products" that essentially suck up peoples' money, in return for which they deny the majority of us decent medical coverage, strongarm our physicians into NOT treating us, and refuse to pay for things that we actually need.
Why don't we do for these charming leeches what CSAs are doing for Big Agribiz all across the country, and cut them out of the loop? After all, it's OUR MONEY, dammit.
If 70% of GPs and pediatricians are FOR single-payer medicine, as are at least 40% of the public [comprised of those who know about it, I suspect] maybe some percentage of them might be up for the following idea.
Why not Community Supported Medicine?
People can subscribe to a medical group, making payments that are less than the cost of an insurance payment every month, and when there's an illness or a medical problem, they have immediate access to treatment.
The medical group can use part of the subscription moneys to create a group plan for the entire "CSM" that covers cases of dire emergency, expensive treatments, or hospital stays, and can also work with local pharmacists, herbalists, and health food stores to create plans around generic meds and complementary treatments for most common illnesses.
Long-term care and so forth could be added to the package as the CSM grows. House calls might be considered as part of the program as less expensive than maintaining a larger office, in terms of care for the elderly and chronically ill.
Seems to me that a hundred people faithfully paying a relatively low monthy fee for the right to a checkup and light emergency care [for the most part] are going to be more cost-effective to any practice than 50 covered people whose plans won't pay [or pay on time] plus a bunch of non-covered people struggling to get $75 together for a first-time office visit because they put their hand into a slicer or have a strange rash.
Part of the CSM agreement would be a malpractice agreement with its members that cuts the doctors a bit of slack but also protects its members in a reasonable way.
Go ahead and tell me why this can't work, but then please tweak it and find the ways that it could.
Let's kick the thieving bums out of our medical equation, since they're kicking us out of theirs.
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