You Want Government Healthcare

So many people are on the single payer healthcare train, partly because it is being sold as a panacea for all our ills.

Many of us have been warning people of all the problems that does come with government healthcare.  MLive is reporting that Bronson Healthcare is laying off 72 employees across “the system”.

Why is a good company like Bronson Healthcare having to lay-off 72 people, well according to a statement by Bronson Communications Specialist Carolyn Wyllie, the staff reductions are due to the fact that 2019 revenue was lower than expected.  She then explained that the revenue is lower than expected due to:

• insurance payments shifting from inpatient to lower outpatient rates for many types of care.
• More adults turning 65 and moving from commercial/private insurance to lower paying Medicare/government plans.
• A greater enrollment in high deductible plans because patients cannot afford to pay their deductibles.

It is common sense that when you move from private insurance, which pays a much higher reimbursement rate than the government Medicare plan, there is less money for the hospitals to run their businesses, thus they need to cut somewhere.  Due to the fact that their labor force constitutes 61% of Bronson’s operating costs it is only logical that labor would be cut the most.

According to healthcaredive.com:

CBO reviewed 21 frequent and costly services. CBO found private insurance pays physicians much more than Medicare, particularly for brain MRIs, intensity-modulated radiation therapy, abdominal MRIs and knee arthroscopy. The highest physician payments for those services were at least 350% higher than Medicare payments. The average for those procedures was more than 200% higher for private payers compared to Medicare.

If our future is single payer government healthcare we will see more lay-offs, reduced pay for workers, less time in front of a doctor and more time in front of at NP or PA, longer wait times and less innovative drug treatments discovered by pharmaceutical companies.

At that point all we can really say is good luck with our single payer government healthcare plan and most importantly our health.