okay what do you think about uh this health insurance business
well i watched something on TV a couple of months ago by uh General ex uh Surgeon General Koop
um-hum
and he talked about Canada's system and it appears to work fine for the normal colds and things like that but the expensive stuff heart uh operations and things they have a
managed scarcity and they said that in Canada there were as many
heart uh trauma centers as there is in San Francisco
so in one city of in America there's as many uh hospitals that are equipped to do hospital uh heart operations as in the entire area of Canada and that's kind of spooky
well i uh
i understand what you're saying and there's probably some truth to that i think that uh generally i don't
welcome added government responsibilities however when a
anybody can't police their own profession it eventually leads to that and i think the costs and the uh
the way the medical profession has every year i uh being in my own business uh in the last six years every year there's been at least minimum twenty five percent increase in health insurance costs
and
i think eventually the number of people that can afford health insurance as as it is now getting squeezed and squeezed tighter uh
uh-huh
i think they're asking for it i i think the medical profession is just
just pushing until there's no option but the government take it over and uh
do you think that it's just the medical guys what about you know you know how expensive new equipment and technology is that's where i think most of the cost is coming
well i i think a lot of it is uh i i don't
disagree totally with that but uh my wife this last summer uh when we were on vacation tore up her knee and uh
uh it it was ligaments ligaments uh in her knee as it turned out uh she came back that uh we were out at Cape Hatteras when this happened and uh she got home
uh-huh
and the leading orthopedic man who has handled football people for years and is as good as they come i mean he knows knee problems okay i mean if anyone does this guy knows it
um-hum
well she goes in and he says well i think this is what it is but uh you better go to the hospital and have one of these MRI things thousand dollars for this uh
oh Magnetic uh Resonance uh Imaging type thing and my wife said well uh do i need that and he he says well uh
you know it it'll help me diagnose this i mean uh you know i i suggest you go have this thing insurance won't pick this up unless you're in the hospital
oh great
now a thousand uh uh dollars for thirty five minutes i mean doctors routinely send people in for anything now for years they didn't have this and they solved these problems
and you know i said to her well look you know if you feel you got to go go but i i think a thousand dollars these guys i don't know what it is but there's no doubt they get kickbacks to fill these machines up night and day
in
and even if they cost a hundred two hundred five hundred thousand dollars at uh roughly a thousand dollars every half hour uh that's ridiculous
i i don't care what anyone says those you know the costs are not it's a picture
it shouldn't cost more than thirty five bucks for something like that you know reasonableness but they aren't reasonable fifty a hundred dollars they don't have to pay them back in three months time you you know
you know yeah i'll have to agree with you there but there's another problem and that's the
how litigious our society is if the doctor makes a mistake he can be sure that he's gonna to be hauled into court
well i think that should be that's that's a another problem but that's part of our legalese problem and that the government eventually will address too just you know because it's out of control i i agree with you
you know uh i was on a jury or i i didn't make the jury but there was a deal where a doctor was gonna be sued for malpractice on the death of an infant
uh-huh
like it was three days after it was born and he was the one that delivered it and they got four attorneys one guy out of Houston he introduced himsnelf as snake so-and-so he says well anyone have trouble awarding five million dollars
and i says yeah i got problems with that i mean you know five million bucks isn't going to bring this kid back you know i mean as sorrowful as it is
uh you know if the doctor is wrong you know it he should be pulled from his license but five million dollars and away he goes because insurance pays for it
you know it it it it doesn't make logical sense to me but uh
no it doesn't
uh that's
