Pajamas Media

13 Comments

Despite the progress you cite at large multinational employers, the ranks of the uninsured continue to grow. Tens of millions of citizens are unable to avail themselves of the health care system at all. Small businesses and the self-employed often go without insurance, and the unemployed are especially vulnerable.

Providing universal coverage for all Americans is the best way to provide unified, coordinated and cost-efficient care. The innovation that has taken place in the private sector has been far from adequate to address the health care needs of the nation. Private insurance will always be in conflict with the public need for comprehensive and effective care.

The answer to the health care crisis is universal coverage, not window-dressing from large employers.

Peace.

DS

Can you imagine if the gov`n nationalizes health care and then legalizes all the iilegals how that will open the flood gates for the hordes all over the planet to scurry to the US. You think we have a problem with our borders now……….

No, David S, the answer is NOT universal coverage. This is a typical Leftist response. It addresses the symptoms, not the problem. The problem is caused by the AMA monopoly of healthcare. There are many treatments out there that work, but the AMA is only interested in the ones that involve drugs and surgery. Your doctor can’t legally prescribe anything else.

I many other threads, I’ve described the situation more fully. I’m sure you’ve read them, but your mind is not open to such things. You want your socialistic answer, regardless if it’s the right answer or not. You’re just here to agitate and argue. You’re not here for dialogue.

Dave S, I work in a hospital and believe me, if someone really needs something, they get it insurance or not. There are many public and private means of paying for this healthcare that are known to the clinics and others who work within the system.

So that particular straw man is a crock.

One problem that is perfectly addressed by the private approaches is that people want everything and anything whether they need it or not. If you’re paying something out of your own pocket, you’re less likely to jump on a fad or bandwagon or have procedures or medications that are iffy at worst, deadly at best.

The ban on advertising for medications and procedures should be reimplemented. With the internet, people can look things up if they want to, but the real determination should come from informed patients and their physicians who have taken the biology, chemistry and everything else required to understand what the hell medications really do and how they really work.

It’s called personal responsibility – try to do the things that keep you healthy, resort to medicine only when necessary.

Employers need to stop providing health insurance their employees. The average cost for individual coverage is somwhere around $6,000, family costs are closer to $10,000.

Why not give an employee $300 to $600 a month (in a health savings account), exempt from payroll tax, and let the employee seek out private insurance just as they do now for their car or house? States could mandate coverage, just as in auto insurance and create minimum coverage standards, as well.

In many cases this would be lower cost to the employer and the employee would have total control on what is or what is not covered. Also this would stop the 10% or more annual increases in cost.

Those employees who take wellness seriously would come out ahead, those who don’t can only blame themselves.

Once the government gets control of health care expect it to go downhill. What took these companies so long?

David S–the unemployed can get medicaid. If not, then what makes you think another government “insurance” plan would be any better?

Like the CATO institute has been saying for 20+ years… the reason health care is so expensive is because of government intrusion into health care service delivery, not due to a lack of interverntion into health care service delivery. The employer tax deduction for paying for health care needs to be repealed. This is just one simple way that republicans could have changed the landscape of the health care debate, but for 8 years they didn’t do squat about it.

I had one of those high-deductable plans with Sun Microsystems, through Aetna, and it was by far the best experience I ever had with health insurance. The exact plan had a $750 per year payment for basic care; up to that limit, there were no complications. They just paid. From there up to some higher limit (maybe $1500? I never actually reached it), I paid, but could use my flexible spending account to pay with pre-tax dollars. After that, it was an old-fashioned major medical plan.

Easy, and I suspect it was less expensive too — at least, it took less from my “cafeteria” benefits than anything other than Kaiser.

@6. Ms.Attitude:

the unemployed can get medicaid.

This is not always true – and millions more are working full time but still unable to afford the cost of insurance. Insurance company profits should not be part of our healthcare expenses. All of our peer countries have universal coverage – our citizens are paying the price for our antiquated system.

Peace.

DS

Ryoung,
The problem is that many people cannot buy health insurance at any price unless they are part of an employer’s risk pool. Simply moving insurance away from employment (a good idea) would leave many now insured with no way to get insurance (a really bad idea).

Only universal insurance will solve that problem – but it requires a universal mandate to pay for it. Otherwise, young healthy people will free-ride with no insurance until they get old, then will pick up the benefits from a system they never paid into.

Universal health, like most socialistic programs, sounds good but is really a bad idea. Look at the quotes and promises that politicians pushing for Social Security, Medicare, etc. all promised when they started – now look at the consequences that we live with. These two programs eat up the lion’s share of our federal budget.

Just name one federal government program, ever in our history, that ran on budget, on time and which meets everyone’s need. Most politicians are lawyers, not doctors, I want medical professioanls running a clinic, not lawyers.

Let’s do socialized medicine so my neighbors in Canada won’t be coming down here for health care. We will have rationed MRI’s with old equipment and will be the envy of Cuba.

Just look at a government office for the latest technologies, the post office is just getting colored monitors.

Obama’s planners for the future may be using Win 2000.

The government is incapable of doing much of anything with efficiency, accuracy or right.

Before I make any comments: lets me preface with a full disclosure of my background: I’m currently a medical student surrounded by liberal medical professors and fellow students pushing for socialized medicine. In my encounters with doctors in hospitals, I have found some who are for universal socialized healthcare, all who hate the current system, and almost no advocates of the return to the “golden days” of private market doctoring. I am a strong advocate of markets, an econ minor, and a conservative leaning moderate.

We all know what socialized medicine is for better or for worse, so there is really no need to debate the value of socialized medicine because we can just look next door to Canada or England to see the results and decide whether we want that or not (I personally do not). I would like to debate the value of a free market system:

Despite my free market tendencies, I have trouble seeing how the market is going to work in this case. The patient or the consumer of healthcare is subject to extreme assymetric information making it very difficult for him to distinguish the products of competitors. Furthermore, the patient cannot exactly choose not to buy a product if the cost is death. The seller (the doctor) has all the information and basically tells the patient what to buy. Furthermore, we as doctors, are also trained to advocate for our patients, which seems to me in direct ethical conflict with a market system in which we are a seller. Furthermore, we are paid by the procedure which incentivizes us not to provide preventative care (we as medicals students actually have the ideals of preventative care pounded into us daily, but economic incentives are like laws of physics as all conservatives know, and people respond to incentives just as rocks respond to the laws of physics). In the same vein with this disincentive idea: insurance companies have an incentive not to provide care: they make profit by signing healthy people with insurance and then dumping them when they get sick. Every patient that needs treatment costs the insurance company money, hence it is the economic incentive of the insurance company not to provide care (profit motive, another law of economics that cannot be defied). Thus every incentive is this market based care system seems to push toward sicker patients. This is called market failure.

Fundamentally, the market is driven by supply and demand. There is a limited supply of healthcare, and an unlimited demand for it. the market thus rations (as it does with every product) by price. The question is, is it beneficial to our society to ration by price for a commodity such as healthcare? The capitalist in me scream “Of course! that is how we ration all other products! The commies are idiots and history has proven them so!” The patriot in me says “is that going to result in a stronger America?”

And then, the military historian in me asks: “How is healthcare different from national defense? The soldiers of our nation protect the welfare and productivity of our nation from foreign powers that would seek to weaken it. They are servants of the state and we would never dream of outsourcing that to a private company because national defense is a public good subject to free riding. The market would not be able to provide for national defense. Are not doctors simply soldiers protecting the welfare and productivity of our citizens from foreign microbes and diseases? how is that different from national defense?”

And then the economist in me asks “Is the health of a nation not a public good, and does not the privatization of such a commodity result in extreme negative externalities?” (negative externalities are costs which are not reflected in the market price of a good. aka cigarette prices do not reflect the true cost of cigarettes on society. In this case, rationing healthcare by price costs the nation hugely in lost productivity in those who cannot afford healthcare.)

I think the military historian and the economist in me have very good points. However, the profit seeking doctor in me begs for some more knowledgable economist or conservative out there to poke holes in my arguments so that I can earn more money in a private healthcare system. So please, someone tell me how the market is going to work.

-Parthicus