The Health Care Bill has passed...

[AGDee]

I do realize that, I just think it's a band-aid though, not a fix for what is wrong with the system. I work for a health care system in Detroit, I truly understand the need for insurance for the uninsured. Our system provides hundreds of millions of unreimbursed care annually.

The health care system is so much more broken than just the unreimbursed care though. I know he had to battle just to get this, and hopefully, in the future, people will accept that there are more changes that need to be made. Most insurance companies are in the business of making money. Most are not non-profits. None of the companies that make money off of hospitals/health care are non-profits yet most of the hospitals are (all of them are, in Michigan). A model where you have all these profit organizations having a feeding frenzy off of a non-profit entity is simply wrong. It can't work no matter what.

The only entities that insurance companies have to please are our employers. Our employers are only happy with those insurance companies who offer lower premiums. The only way that insurers can do that is to deny as much care as they can. Most people who don't work in health care do not understand that insurance companies dictate their treatment almost completely. Most do not understand that, if your primary care physician KNOWS that a certain treatment is not right for you, they cannot skip that step and move to a more expensive treatment because they will get points from the insurance company if they don't try things in a specified order. Critical pathways, managed care.. all attempts by the insurance companies to make more money, not truly ways to better manage your illness. There is no real competition among insurance companies for the users of the system. The users of the system are bound to use whatever insurance their employer chooses to provide for them. I don't see much changing until THAT changes.