Lately it seems that all I've been doing is getting sick and recovering then getting sick again. Actually, I'd say that this is a trend that I've followed since I started freshman year in the middle of trying to get over bronchitis. Naturally, this has made me just very obsessed with learning about health and healthcare. Always the healthcare.
I like to use online educational videos to learn about these things. Typically I use the vlogbrothers and Tedtalks to start my obsessions off and then I expand my wanderings to the rest of the interwebs.
To start off with: Health Insurance. I am just completely baffled by it at all times. While Bill Clinton was still called "Mr. President," we became the last industrialized country that didn't have universal healthcare. Now we have to wrestle with the consequences of "moral hazard," that is, high deductibles intended to force people into only getting healthcare that they absolutely need. The only consequence occurs in the lower class...of course, that's where nobody really cares that there is an increase in MORTALITY RATES, right?
Keep in mind, I'm no economist, health care provider, or lower class member. So my words don't carry the weight of actually having experienced this...I will say, however, that the time of my life that I was healthiest was when I maxed out my insurance deductible and all of my healthcare bills were covered for the rest of the year. I would say that when health becomes a result of not having to pay the deductible anymore...then probably there is something wrong with the system. You know, I've probably misrepresented a lot of how our health insurance system works...but the thing is, regardless of how accurate I am, I know that very few are happy with the price and care they are getting, and, from my scholar's project, I know that we overpay for the same quality of care. Sometimes it's just depressing.
