Now it’s up to us.
I find it ironic that the thuggish congressman Grayson is accusing Republicans of wanting people to die, when Robert Reich is very explicit about that as the Dem’s plan.
57 thoughts on “Crunch Time For Health Care”
Comments are closed.
I also like the way you avoid any data points that don’t fit with your world view, it’s like you’ve a tunnel vision problem and anything that isn’t in the direct center of your perspective gets dropped out.
Daveon, my problem with these proposed solutions, single payer, Australian system, etc continues to be the same thing. Namely, that they don’t fix the fundamental problem of expensive health care. I consider that more important than anything else including insuring the uninsured.
Of the proposed solutions I’ve seen bouncing around the Capitol building, they actually increase the cost of health care. Having say a UK-style system with US-style costs (or worse) isn’t an improvement. That’s not useful to me.
Instead there’s a host of changes that need to be made, methodically going through a long list before US healthcare will be comparable to other countries’ health care systems in terms of cost. Most of these do not require some radical change in the health care system (aside from introducing competition at several places in the medical and health insurance industries). Universal health insurance doesn’t help with most of the problems (it would help with the problem of uninsured getting free care in emergency rooms and maybe a little with standardizing and computerizing medical records).
Namely, that they don’t fix the fundamental problem of expensive health care.
No, correct they don’t, insofar as there probably isn’t a perfect solution.
On the other hand, looking at the real world examples, every single single payer system in the world pretty much seems to offer universal coverage with pretty similar results (there are variations but nothing super significant in the G20) for a significant fraction of what the US is currently paying towards healthcare.
My strong suspicion, looking at the examples I know of well, UK and US. The shear admin overhead in a US doctor’s office or hospital is astonishing. Really just out of this world. Add in the insurance backends, and the time people spend fighting with it and you’ve a lot of money that’s a feature of any for-profit system.
I can see that, for some reason, the US excels at failing to implement things cost effectively that other people manage – from car insurance, through driving license management to healthcare.
I wish I could understand why that is though.
All of that doesn’t stop the basic fact that I believe this is, at it’s core, a moral issue. Healthcare for all is a right not a privilege, and no, I don’t actually mind that you have to pay for it with me.
Chris, destroying the insurance market and restructuring it around cross-subsidization is not “above board” — it’s a way to hide the true cost of the subsidy by burying it into premiums and co-pays along with the guarantee that if it’s not enough, they can always just raise taxes later.
However, you’ve finally admitted that the “public option” is just a subsidy from the tax-payer/premium-payer, so there’s hope for you yet.
Well, so long as you understand that it’s a right you just invented, and that others are no less correct to contradict you.
My strong suspicion, looking at the examples I know of well, UK and US. The shear admin overhead in a US doctor’s office or hospital is astonishing. Really just out of this world. Add in the insurance backends, and the time people spend fighting with it and you’ve a lot of money that’s a feature of any for-profit system.
Why would that overhead go away? That’s part of my point. For example, a lot of that overhead comes from decades of government regulation. Every so often they’ll add a new treatment or change the conditions of health insurance so that insurers and employers end up paying more. That also tends to add more paperwork in order to verify that everyone is complying. But insurers aren’t going away, neither does it appear will government health care programs.
A recent example in the Stimulus Bill was, as I understand it, a COBRA requirement that employers pay for their employees health insurance for 18 months instead of 6 months with some sort of nebulous means of obtaining the money from the federal government eventually.
I can see that, for some reason, the US excels at failing to implement things cost effectively that other people manage – from car insurance, through driving license management to healthcare.
We implement taxes more cost effectively. That is, they are less than EU counterparts. And I really don’t know how the various states compare to the UK or elsewhere for driver’s licenses or car insurance. I imagine some are good, some are bad.
The next time any National Health Scheme works will be the first time! At the outset expect this to fail! and don’t blame the Republicans or the Democrats! They all know that it will not work and are just fiddling about mindlessly knowing that none of them have an answer to this whole complex mess that we have created together