Health care reform is real

This month's Dose of Reality concerns the way the American public pays for health care:

[I]t is important to remember that the public always pays, and in fact, it is the only payer of the cost of health care. Many decades ago, the members of the public mostly paid for health care in only one way: by direct payment to health care providers using cash if they could, or chickens and pigs if they could not.

Then during World War II especially, the public begin to pay more of its medical bills by funneling money through insurance companies…But now that is changing as the system is being reforming in an underhanded, backdoor fashion. Leading the reform is the for-profit health insurance industry, and by doing so the industry is slowly putting itself out of business. The steps the industry is now taking to retain profitability are forcing the American public to funnel an increasing proportion of its health care expenditure through other, more efficient pipelines, namely direct payments to medical providers and payments to them through government channels.

In other words, the insurance companies are making it so onerous to pay premiums and co-pays and deductibles that their customers are simply dropping insurance altogether—which means the companies get nothing from them.