Want to know why universal health insurance won’t work? It is because people will abuse it. They will abuse it all the time.

Yahoo had an article today with some mind boggling stats from emergency rooms around Austin Texas.

Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report. The patients went to hospital emergency rooms 2,678 times from 2003 through 2008, said the report from the nonprofit Integrated Care Collaboration, a group of health care providers who care for low-income and uninsured patients.
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The average emergency room visit costs $1,000. Hospitals and taxpayers paid the bill through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, Kitchen said.
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Eight of the nine patients have drug abuse problems, seven were diagnosed with mental health issues and three were homeless.

Ok, let’s do some math. 2678 visits / 9 people = 297.5 visits each. 6 years X 365 days = 2190 days. 2190 days / 297.5 visits = 7.36 days between visits. These people went to the ER an average of once a week for six straight years. You and I paid 3 million dollars in taxes so that 9 hypochondriac drug addicts could waste the time of hospital employees who could have been treating people who actually needed it.

Everybody think about this for a minute and then tell me how well you think universal health care is going to work.

Health insurance is expensive. Really expensive. Why is this? There are many problems with the system, but I am going to try and point out a few of the flaws and maybe a solution (at least partial anyway).

All American Blogger has a few ideas why government run health care will fail. Duane shares this quote is from Democrat Missouri State Representative Steve Hodges who thinks that infertility treatment should be covered by health insurance:

We spend millions upon millions of dollars trying to assist people, even in terminal situations with cancer, with a lot of different things,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Steve Hodges, D-East Prairie. “To me, this is a very positive medical procedure. Nothing but good things could come out of it, and I know everything has its cost, whether it’s good or bad.

This is part of the reason why health insurance is so expensive. Policy makers around the country keep adding things to be covered that simply don’t need to be in every policy.
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