Medicare Coverage Of Diabetes Supplies And Services: Fill & Download for Free

Medicare for all and other forms of universal health care coverage make a fundamental economic fallacy, that the economic problem is paying for goods and services. The real problem is one of producing the right supply.Before Henry Ford applied mass production assembly line methods to manufacturing automobiles, they were a rich man's toy. It required the labor of a large number of mechanics working on one automobile for months to get just one car finished.If the government had stepped in and said "automobiles for everyone" and just given people money to buy the cars, would that have provided everyone with their own transportation? It would have driven the price up to even higher astronomic levels, and the same number of cars would have still been available. Or maybe more workers would have started building cars, and fewer workers would have been available to the railroads, or textile manufacturing, or some industry. An increased supply of cars would have come at the expense of an decreased supply of something else.What is required to make some product or service more available to more people is to increase the supply. This may involve more people providing it. In the case of health care, that means more doctors and nurses and medical technicians, more hospital beds, more and less expensive medicines and medical supplies.In the case of doctors and nurses, this may mean you just have to train more people to become doctors and nurses. In other aspects of medical care, you need to reduce the number of workers needed to produce a larger supply. This means automating laboratory services, or competition between the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies.The problem is that we have this doctors' cartel called the American medical Association which limits the number of people who can become doctors, and we have the FDA licensing the manufacture of even drugs which have been in the public domain for decades. Pharmaceuticals such as the Epipen and Daraprim are government protected monopolies. Even though the patents on these drugs have expired, you still need to go through an expensive testing procedure to get the government's permission to produce these drugs, which have already been proven safe and effective.On top of all that, we have the government always looking for new ways to shovel more money at health care. We have Medicare and Medicaid which provide patients with billions of dollars to spend on health care, and all sorts of regulation to get third parties like insurance companies to pay for ever more health care.This is where that fallacy of paying for it comes in. It is natural for individuals to think that their own economic problem is one of paying for the goods and services they want and need. If YOU have the money to buy something, you can buy it. The problem emerges when someone else also has the money, and there is a limited supply. And there is always a limited supply. This is the basic law of supply and demand. If ever more people want to buy something, and have more money with which to pay for it, they start bidding up the price. Medicare and Medicaid keep paying out more, and health insurance companies see the prices they have to pay increase, so they increase their premiums to pay for it. More and more money goes to pay for a limited supply of health care services, so the prices keep going up, making it ever harder for those who pay for their own health care to meet the price. This makes the problem of paying for health care seem all that more urgent, so the government passes more regulations on insurance companies to get them to pay more, and increase how much Medicare and Medicaid pay out, to more people. More money causes the prices to rise, and higher prices mean more people to demand that the government and insurance companies provide even more money. Its a vicious cycle that causes health care prices to spiral ever upward.The solution is not to have the government take over entirely, and put a cap on prices. This simply results in the kinds of discoordinations that you usually get from socialism. You get shortages, waiting lists, rationing, and generally poor service.Insulin shortage could affect 40 million people with type 2 diabetesNHS needs thousands of overseas doctors to plug GP shortageGovernment must 'urgently investigate' 9,000 new NHS vacancies in just three months, experts warnPharmacists warn of medicine shortageThe UK is ‘pretty close’ to the worst drug shortage it’s experienced in a decade: here are the top drugs of concernNHS operation waiting lists reach 10-year high at 4.3m patients

As everything appears a nail to a hammer, so everything bends to market principles to a free marketer. However, healthcare isn't amenable to the free market.After all, we need healthcare the most when we are least in charge of ourselves and therefore least capable of negotiating a fair bargain on our own behalf. Loved ones would also be negotiating on our behalf with the proverbial gun to their heads. This is why a pure healthcare free market could only ever be a shakedown of a captive buyer by a seller engaged in a profiteering racket.Other developed countries have somehow understood this unalterable fundamental and accordingly arranged their healthcare systems to sustain some form of universal coverage while the US has unfortunately got its head stubbornly stuck up Ayn Rand's ass.November 19, 1945 was the closest the US came to a having a sensible healthcare policy when then-President Harry S. Truman proposed creating a federally run, universal health care plan, the national health insurance (NHI).Obviously that never came to pass and since then the US healthcare system has evolved to consist of an unnecessarily complex patchwork of private and public services, with most Americans reliant on employment-based private insurance (below from 1). Why are US employers involved in an individual's healthcare decisions anyway? How could a practice that so reeks of paternalism take root in the land of the free, home of the brave? Questions for sages of the ages to ponder.Implicitly assuming the current US healthcare system operates on free market principles is also inaccurate since it in fact doesn't. On the contrary, the evidence clearly suggests that the free market in the current US healthcare system is thumbs on the scale all the way. All too often free markets deviate wildly in practice from how they're supposed to operate in theory. Regulatory capture is usually the reason why.The current US healthcare system is best described as the monster child of singularly comprehensive regulatory capture and the population's learned helplessness, with hopelessly compromised US legislators serving as apparently hapless midwives; a system where patients, the people who should have the most say in what the system should be and how it should operate, instead turn out to have the least.The tyrannical hold of practices such as the Chargemaster - Wikipedia, fee-for-service and regulation-free drug pricing offer many unmistakable signs of deathly regulatory capture of the US healthcare system, which has thus become one that vainly attempts but fails to provide comprehensive yet affordable healthcare to all too many while those with deep pockets or in the US Congress avail of the best healthcare anywhere in the world.News reports on the US healthcare system are routinely replete with details of runaway costs that violate common sense, an unmistakable sign of thorough regulatory capture.A baby cost her mother's employer US $1 million (2).A US hospital charged $1877 to pierce a 5 year old's ears (3).Three stitches on a skinned knee cost $2299.11 while a child's forehead gash sealed with a dab of skin glue cost $1696 (4).Average pregnancy in the US costs $32093 (5) to $37341 on average (6), making US births the costliest in the worldA mother was bankrupted after giving birth to premature twins (7).The high price of insulin cost a diabetes patient his life from being compelled to engage in dangerous rationing (8).The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman auctioned his award for $756000 in 2015 to help pay for medical bills and care (9).Apparently no one knows how much anything can cost in a US hospital, from a knee surgery (10) to neck surgery (11) to ER visits (12).The normal laws of supply and demand don't work in the US drug market.For example, Novartis first marketed the anti-cancer drug, Gleevec (Imatinib), in 2001 with the price tag of $30000 per year and yet 11 years later in 2012, they priced it at $92000 per year, even as competitors had come up with comparable drugs in the interim. Instead of driving down cost as competition is supposed to do in a free market, Gleevec's price skyrocketed instead.More below on the extent to which drugs cost way more in the US than in other countries from 13.The gruesome irony is that, from the unlucky many at the bottom of the economic pyramid to the lucky few perched at its rarefied heights, all pay through their noses for the privilege of access to healthcare services in the US. Did I write all? My bad. US legislators avail themselves of the best healthcare at insultingly reasonable costs, thank you very much.Regardless how most of those at the receiving end fare, the sellers in this patchwork quilt are certainly making out like bandits, all at the expense of the US government, which gets bilked through its nose, as we see from the figure from 1. This means the US taxpayer gets bilked in turn, making US healthcare system a poster child for socialized cost-privatized profit.What else could happen after self-dealing lawmakers single-mindedly keep enacting legislations that prioritize healthcare product and service sellers at the expense of buyers/payers (public and private coverage) and consumers. This process has been in place for decades. A couple of salient examples,One of most consequential shots across the bow was the 1995 decision when the US NIH (14)“relinquished its right to require "reasonable pricing" on drugs and other products developed in cooperation between the Government and industry. The pricing policy had been opposed by business interests since it was imposed six years ago.Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the institutes, said the research agency would give up the option to review the introductory price of products developed from basic research sponsored by the Government. The policy was adopted in 1989 in response to criticism that drugs developed with substantial Government help were being marketed at excessive prices.”The Medicare part D expansion in 2003 deliberately hobbles Medicare from negotiating drug prices. If Medicare with its mammoth size can't negotiate drug prices, what chances the thousands of much smaller players in the US health insurance scene can do better?No surprise then that the US has the highest per capita prescription drug prices (below from 15).Innovations of the US healthcare system currently include such grotesqueries asPeople desperately soliciting funds from strangers on Go Fund Me to help pay for medical bills.Being able to declare personal bankruptcy to get medical debt forgiven.Job lock - Wikipedia, where millions of US workers toil in jobs they likely hate only so they can hang on to their employment-based healthcare coverage. This has all sorts of pernicious cascading effects, from poor morale and poor productivity at the individual level to lack of innovation and dwindling rates of entrepreneurship at the societal level.Adequate healthcare services fast evaporating in rural areas in lock-step with escalating costs that make operating them in such areas unsustainable.Patient dumping of indigents treated in ERs becoming ever more the norm as we see from viral videos of such malpractice.Popularity of medical NGOs like Remote Area Medical - Wikipedia who are greeted like rock stars when they swing through a town. This is literally true because RAM doles out free medical care at its pop-up clinics, which are usually held at local sports arenas, where people drive from even hundreds of miles away to camp out and stand in long queues to get access to even the most basic of medical services such as new eyeglasses or dental work.As costs soar to astronomical levels,US health insurance companies have taken to transferring more of the cost burden directly onto consumers through high-deductible plans and cost sharingUS employers, already stretched to breaking point from offering blindingly expensive health insurance plans to employees, are wholesale moving away from having employees altogether and instead opting for contractors sourced from staffing companies. When even global giants like Google have 1 contractor or more for every single full-time employee, it's obvious healthcare costs are literally breaking US companies' backs.Medical tourism where US patients access health services in poorer countries like India, which only deprives citizens of such countries even more of the already sub-optimal healthcare that already exists there.Such abominations have not only become the norm for many in the US, Americans themselves are so inured to this, they accept it as normal, quite a pathetic state of affairs indeed in the wealthiest country in the world.In a nutshell, US policy since the 1980s has systematically institutionalized price gouging and opacity on the part of service providers (sellers) even as it has hobbled the negotiating power of healthcare service payers, i.e., public and private coverage. Nothing in this process was inevitable or unavoidable. The public is largely apathetic, having been acculturated to the status quo through the process of learned helplessness. After all, how many Americans routinely live in other countries long enough to understand just how different and even equitable healthcare services could or indeed should be?The US is today thus ideal for those who are healthy and childless, a fool's paradise if ever there was one since even they are only a chance away from a catastrophic accident.Bibliography1. Dickman, Samuel L., David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler. "Inequality and the health-care system in the USA." The Lancet 389.10077 (2017): 1431-1441. http://www.rootcausecoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Inequality-and-the-health-care-system-in-the-USA.pdf2. 'We blame the sick for being expensive': the mother whose baby cost AOL $1m3. A Hospital Charged $1,877 to Pierce a 5-Year-Old’s Ears. This Is Why Health Care Costs So Much. — ProPublica4. As Hospital Prices Soar, a Stitch Tops $5005. Why does it cost $32,093 just to give birth in America?6. American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World7. Bankrupted by giving birth: having premature twins cost me everything | Jen Sinconis8. Insulin's High Cost Leads To Lethal Rationing9. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman dies at 9610. What Does Knee Surgery Cost? Few Know, and That’s a Problem11. After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didn’t Know12. Sarah Kliff brings transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time13. Why the U.S. Pays More Than Other Countries for Drugs14. U.S. Gives Up Right to Control Drug Prices15. Kesselheim, Aaron S., Jerry Avorn, and Ameet Sarpatwari. "The high cost of prescription drugs in the United States: origins and prospects for reform." Jama 316.8 (2016): 858-871. https://preview.thenewsmarket.com/Previews/JOUR/DocumentAssets/446118.pdf

If Medicare is your secondary coverage, Part A will pay for in patient care in the hospital or skilled nursing facility. It will cover hospice, home health care and inpatient care in a religious nonmedical health care institution. It covers charges not paid by your primary (like your deductible and your co-insurance amounts).If you also have Part B (most people do and you pay for this coverage as a monthly premium, but most people don't pay for Part A) it will pay for doctors and healthcare providers office services, various screenings, ambulance services, alcohol misuse screening and counseling, ambulatory surgical centers, blood processing and handling, mammograms, cardiac rehabilitation, chemotherapy, chiropractic services, chronic care management, defibrillator, mental health issues, diabetic supplies, durable medical equipment and many other things. Part B has a deductible you are required to meet prior to it paying for these things. I don't know the exact amount, but I think it's less than $200 annually.So if you have a primary provider and then Medicare Part A and Bas a secondary you most likely will have very little out of pocket expense.