Health Insurance
July 20th 2010 01:24
Do you have health insurance? No? Neither do I. But being a pensioner I can’t really afford to pay $500.00 per year to get what I get now for free. Sound strange? I suppose it does but have a close look at health insurance companies, the hundreds of them.
All health Insurance Companies get a 30% subsidy from the Commonwealth Government.
What this means is that the Australian taxpayer is paying about one third of the cost of running the Commercial Insurance Company. That is one third of:
The advertising costs
The office rental costs
The wages of staff
The Super costs of the company
The general costs of the Insurance Company.
The staff holiday pay
IS THIS A FAIR GO? No, of course it’s not a fair go. Too much money going to anything but the actual health of the member.
Many years ago we had just three Health Insurance Companies and life was simple and quite good. If you contributed to a Health Insurance Scheme you got some real benefit from it. The benefits were related to basic health. In today’s health Insurance promotional blurbs you seem to get more “associated” treatments than genuine health benefits. For instance ‘remedial massage’ is one that always gets my back up and makes me angry. If you need that sort of treatment for legitimate reasons, it is included in the treatment prescribed by a doctor.
For true medical treatment the Insurers say you can choose your own Doctor, what they don’t say is that most of the population can’t do that. Their doctor is the local GP (general Practicioner) and should a specialist be required the GP refers the patient to his choice of specialist. How can a patient choose a specialist? Most of us ordinary people don’t even know a specialist.
The next point is that you, as a member, will not get your total bill paid for at either the hospital or the Doctor (Specialist), you will be required to pay at least 15% percent. The insurance company probably figures that if you can afford the insurance premiums you can afford to pay some of the bill when services are required.
My contention is simply that all those dollars of taxpayers money given to support Health Insurance Companies would be better spent on providing better health services directly to the people. I wonder how many millions of dollars of taxpayers money is being siphoned off for private gain instead of being used for the benefit of all the people of this country.
Of course the foregoing is merely my opinion and me being an old age pensioner, will have little consideration given to it, if any at all.
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