Medical Care Information

In this article today I’d like to give you several tips, tricks, and tactics to help you find free or very low cost medical care; yes it’s out there!

Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last few years you probably have noticed that medical costs have skyrocketed through the roof, and that includes health insurance as well. Within the last two or three years many people have noticed their health insurance premiums doubling or even tripling in cost with no end in sight.

It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you fall into when it comes to congressional health care reform, one thing is for sure… anything we can do to lower our medical costs personally is a great thing.

Fortunately for all of us there are several things you can do to find cheap or even free medical care and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this article today.

The first thing you can do is visit a government health clinic. Clinics are often operated by state and local governments and very often offer free checkups as well as free vaccinations. Sometimes you can find clinics that offer free prenatal child care as well. To find out more information about government health clinics call your state public health department or look them up online.

The drawback for places like these is that it may take an incredibly long time to be seen by a doctor and while you are waiting you can expect to be sitting in a very noisy crowded room so you should really expect to sit there for half a day or longer.

The next way to get free or low-cost health care is by using a dental school. There are around 50 dental schools all across the United States and most of these schools operate clinics that allow their students to perform their newly learned skills on live people. You can expect basic services such as checkups, cleanings, and maybe fillings for free or low-cost. Don’t worry, the students are closely supervised by professionals.

Finally you can often get free medications from most pharmaceutical companies. Many of them offer indigent programs that give free pills to people underneath a certain annual household income, sometimes around $50,000 a year. Unfortunately many of these programs require the request of your personal doctor but if you can get your doctor to sign off it can be a great deal.

So there you have several ways to get free and low-cost medical care. Like I said earlier, medical cost just keep skyrocketing and anything we can do to lower those prices is beneficial to everyone. There are many other ways to get free medical care as well, you just have to put in the leg work to do the research to find them.

Each update on universal medical insurance I hear on the television has a different opinion.  According to certain commentators the countries who use socialized medicine have hurt their economies and are forced to ration the availability of health care to senior citizens.  According to others they see the advantage or bonus of socialized medicine and all its positives and see none of the negative aspects of universal health care.

I’m in favor of a universal health care system.  However, I’m afraid that there are more ways to create a lousy system that will be no better than what we have than there are to create a good system.  We have to do this right or we are going to be stuck with the negative aspects of National Health Care without all of the positives.

Few people believe that Universal healthcare will not create higher taxes.  However, we are paying for our broken system already.  If certain of those costs go away, we may wind up with more money in our pockets.

Now, a person  who needs emergency medical care will almost certainly be be treated whether or not he or she has the means to pay for the treatment.  You and I pay for the medical services.  The provider has to raise the prices.  It charges its insured customers to make up for the ones that don’t pay.  At the same time it ruins the credit of the patient who can’t write a check for the cost of the services.

Another side effect that worries many is the drain on our economy that may be caused by those who lose their ambition because they get qualify for free health care.  I suppose that only time will tell, but I think that if we have more healthy people more people will be available to work.  There are probably more ambitious people who are unable to work because of poor health care than there are people who would become lazy when better medical care is available to them.

The positives of socialized medicine include the lessening of employment discrimination for the older workers.  If the burden of the cost if insurance were shifted to the government, older and sicker people may be more employable.  An employer who interviews an older or less healthy applicant, today may focus on how that applicant would raise their group medical insurance premiums and not on the skills and knowledge that person might bring to the job.

Older, more experienced workers and managers will in many cases do a better job than less experienced workers and managers.  This can increase the efficiency of an employer and mean that the firm and our country better because of it.

Potential entrepreneurs will be able to start their own business without leaving their health insurance behind.  The fear of losing health insurance has kept many people shackled to jobs that they have long ago out grown. National medical care will perhaps allow certain great man or woman to invent the next big thing, whatever that may be.

Today a parent may be unable to pay for both the food she or he needs to feed their family and the healthcare that they need.  This can mean that this parent dies early leaving youngsters behind.  A health care system with good preventative care that is available to all can keep these parents around to rear their children and better prepare them to for life.

I think that what we all want is a stronger economy and a better country.  Socialized medicine improves our country by making older, more productive workers and managers more productive. It can also extend the time that some of our youth gets to spend with their parents and have a major impact on our future as a country.