High health care costs finally explained, exclusively on the Talus post.

Seriously folks, why do we have high health care costs? I am only old enough to remember the 80's so lets start there.
In the 1980s doctors were the culprit. They were paid too highly and unfortunately I had not become one yet. So insurance companies and Medicare started to bring theire costs down by capping what doctors could bill for procedures. This helped in one area of health care but costs still soared through the 90s due to high hospital costs which insurance companies and medicare are still trying to get under control. Then along came the drug companies and they are the experts. They create drugs to save lives and advertise them on TV so we all want them. (That reminds me, drug companies were going to save lives so how come we have all the erectile dysfunction pills and sleeping pills costing the most........do you think they told us they would save lives so we bought into it?) Drugs have become so expensive that Medicare passed "part D" which pays for drugs for seniors - just not the ones in high school, they still have to get them on the black market. So Medicare part D will fix it right? Wrong. The Bush Administration put a clause in the bill that forbids Medicare from negotiating in bulk to lower drug costs. And you cynics out there suggest that corporations are running Congress! They are saving our lives people and I for one don't like your tone!
Two recent articles in the world of health news will explain this further. Experts are befuddled by a recent finding in which strokes in women have soared despite the fact that many women are taking cholesterol lowering medications (called statins). With no better explanation the experts have blamed it on fat people even though the study didn't focus on how fat these people were. They just simply blamed fat (like they do for every other terrorist act) and concluded that people had to lose weight. Back in the olden days -- before any of us were around -- scientists would have actually studied that possibility and if found to be true they would have done two things. 1)Start people on a program to lose weight and 2)told people to quit taking the statins because obviously they are doing no good. And therein lies the exact problem. Statins are a $10 billion drug in the US alone for one single company and that means they are upwards of $30 billion worldwide when all statins are taken into consideration. It makes sense to look at the statins critically and stop using them if they are not helping and then focus on another area. But in the moderna age of health care what happens is that we keep piling on. If the blood pressure pill isn't working then take statins but continue to take the blood pressure pill. If the statins aren't working then your too fat so lose some weight. And, oh yeah, keep taking the blood pressure pills and statins. If Losing weight doesn't work then take a biolongitudinal eradicator pill. By the way, the biolongitudinal eradicator pill hasn't been invented yet and it is a word I made up but I am sure that something like that will be made and this will be the next pill to save us all from death......and dont forget to keep taking the high blood pressure pill, the statin and lose weight too because those will help as well.