Cool. Another needless pseudo-intellectual renaming of a more commonly known term. "Blaming the victim"
But if you'll notice, never one did I blame any victim. Never once did I endorse over paying for insurance.
Many financially poor, want to pay their own bills. Most expect to pay their own bills. The concept of entitlement comes as a shock to most of the new immigrant poor. I live in a southern conservative area where many Vietnamese boat people immigrated. (they call themselves that). They were clearly victims before they left. They were victimized many times by folks here. No one wanted the Vietnamese living among them. The world was not just.
However, it turns out those Vietnamese people were. They worked hard. Pooled their own money. Loaned their own money. Started their own businesses. Paid their own tuition. Paid their own bill. It never occurred to them there should be any alternative. I never heard of a single case of them begging for a bank loan, or purchasing insurance. (Not in the first two decades) Yet there were never complaints of them "draining the system". They always met every obligation. Their society wouldn't let anyone fuck things up for the rest of them. Now people flock to their neighborhoods. They make great neighbors.
I am claiming the root of over priced health care is two fold. 1) Insurance. 2) Entitlement The two are in fact orthogonal concepts. But psychologically many have conflated the concepts.
1) Insurance causes "price increases" (not provider cost increases) for the obvious reason. Insurance companies *must* pay whatever prices are billed. They negotiate in order to avoid this getting out of hand. In the absence of insurance, medical providers must limit their prices to only what people are actually *able* to pay.
This is a corollary to mortgage loans affecting housing prices. In the absence of mortgage loans the average house would be priced around $80,000. Or whatever it turned out an average family could actually save in a few years.
Both insurance and mortgages were created
to help responsible people pay their obligations. Their creation had the unintended side effect of increasing commodity prices. (Not the cost to produce the commodity.)
2) Entitlement is the opposite of helping people meet their own obligations. It should have absolutely nothing to do with insurance or mortgages.
However, some perverted psychologic concept caused envious people to say, "Hey that guy is going to the Doctor but he doesn't have to pay. His insurance company has to pay. What make him so fucking special?" This was a perverted view of course because, on average, everyone with insurance was already paying more for insurance (or being rewarded less in salary) than they would be if they just paid for their own care.
In honor of rainingbitcoins, I'll call this perversion, "Just-World Envy". Envying the victim for getting screwed, and demanding they get screwed too, purely out of fairness.
But like going to a hooker, when confronted with the cost of getting screwed they balked. "He that guy is rich! He can afford to get screwed! But what about me? I'm too poor to get screwed honestly! Hence, the birth of the concept, "Entitlement". I'm too poor to get screwed by the insurance companies. So I'm entitled to rape the doctor.
This perceived entitlement (of not having to pay) is what began the drive up in actual health care costs. These increasing costs compounded the provider's above dive to increase prices. Thus further raising insurance rates, and further screwing the responsible.
Realizing they were being screwed, the responsible began demanding only the absolute best, most expensive, treatments. Shouldn't they be entitled? After all they are paying for all the deadbeat fuck heads?.
Hospitals and Doctors are perfectly happy to sell expensive products if there is a DEMAND for them. And of course there is. Who wants to pay for less than the absolute best health care? Even if that CAT/PET scan is unnecessary medically. At least it, psychologically, makes you feel better knowing you absolutely don't have something the doctor told you that you couldn't possibly have.
Of course, since you are entitled not-to-pay for basic health care. Shouldn't you also be entitled not-to-pay for the unnecessary treatments the responsible are paying for? It's only fair...
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Sure, it's TL;DR
But solving the problem, means first acknowledging the problem. Ask any alcoholic.
