16 thoughts on “California’s Universal Health Care”

  1. When I see signs that say ‘health care is a human right’ there’s no point in reading further. We are raising another generation of morons.

  2. Oh would it? Really? Or are people already paying that much or more to private insurers and practitioners?

    When you are in a world where private insurers get preferential pricing and you can’t pay expenses out of pocket is when you should realize that there is no free market in this business at all. It’s time to make it single payer. The whole business is just paper pushing anyway. They have no assets. It’s just a fucking predatory scheme.

    The only other alternative is to force the professionals in this area to make their prices public and the same to all comers regardless if it’s to someone paying out of pocket or to an insurance company.

    The fact that you guys don’t have universal health care is one of the reasons why I don’t want to move there.

    2. Yeah, single payer. Like the UK, with the eugenics system you’ve got set up there:

      The Liverpool Care Pathway was first developed at a Marie Curie [Cancer Care] hospice in the city with the intention of making the last days and hours of cancer sufferers as decent and painless as possible.

      It rapidly became fashionable: recognized as a model for the NHS in 2001; approved by NICE [the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care on a cost-benefit basis] as a recommended practice in 2004; and a 2006 health white paper said it should be adopted across the country. Its use spread from cancer sufferers to all patients. Doctors are supposed to identify a patient who is bound to die in the near future.

      The plan then can include withdrawal of treatment, including the provision of water and nourishment by tube. Patients are typically heavily sedated.

      It certainly is much, much cheaper to let the elderly die, and in a state system, you have uncaring bureaucrats.

      1. Murdering old farts by dehydration is terribly civilized, old chap.

        It’s worth noting that at least one person saved by their family from the ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’ went on to live a year or more afterwards.

        It’s utterly vile, and merely reinforces the view that many medical staff are just legalized serial killers (if I remember correctly, several of Britain’s most prolific serial killers worked in hospitals and murdered patients en masse).

    3. Your ideology makes you stupid. Your health care and ours in Canada both suck compared to the admittedly broken system the Americans have. Single payer is communism at its core, and we know how that works.

    4. It’s just a fucking predatory scheme.

      That is what single payer is.

      With single payer, a small number of people decide what treatments will be made available or developed. Rather than serving hundreds of millions of customers, the systems serves one customer.

      It is really single customer not single payer. We all pay for it but we wont have the ability to influence current and future treatments.

      It would be far better if providers had to satisfy hundreds of millions of customers instead of just a few. And it would be better if anyone who had an idea for a device or treatment was able to develop it rather than having to rely on the whims of government officials about what type of treatments can be offered.

    5. there is no free market in this business at all

      I can fix that with one small change. Insurance companies must be required to pay the patient and nobody else. The patient can then decide how much they will pay and to whom.

      In just one hospital bill from two years ago my insurance paid the hospital $750,000. I could easily have negotiated that down if I had control of the insurance payment.

      That’s the power of a free market.

  3. Oh would it? Really? Or are people already paying that much or more to private insurers and practitioners?

    When you are in a world where private insurers get preferential pricing and you can’t pay expenses out of pocket is when you should realize that there is no free market in this business at all. It’s time to make it single payer. The whole business is just paper pushing anyway. They have no assets. It’s just a frikin predatory scheme.

    The only other alternative is to force the professionals in this area to make their prices public and the same to all comers regardless if it’s to someone paying out of pocket or to an insurance company.

    The fact that you guys don’t have universal health care is one of the reasons why I don’t want to move there.

  4. Sorry for the spam. Please delete one of the posts above. The site was unresponsive so I ended up reposting it.

  5. “The current situation is horrible! Let’s fix it by replacing existing providers with just one, that lacks even the need to pay lip service to proper care, to innovation, or even to obeying the law!”

    1. “Incompetent government bureaucrats have taken a system with a few problems and over-regulated it and screwed it up and generally made a total mess of things. The only possible solution is to marxify it and turn it all over the those same government bureaucrats. This time they’ll get it right”

    2. The problems facing health care in the US can largely be traced to insufficient free market, due to goobernment interference. And the proposed “solution” involves removing what remains of free market competition, under the excuse that “free markets don’t work in medicine.”

      1. Marxism doesn’t work even when it’s given every advantage. Capitalism doesn’t work when you thoroughly break it. Let’s give Marxism another try because Capitalism clearly isn’t working!

  6. Karl Denninger over at http://www.market-ticker.org has talked about this lots. Force posting of prices, no preference for insurance companies in pricing. Karl says this is all covered by existing black letter law in the US which simply is not being enforced.
    I can see how it works at present. You have a procedure requiring hospitalization which you are billed $50,000 for and you pass that on to the insurance company who agree to pay the hospital $5000 under their little agreed deal. The hospital does nicely as it costs them only $2500 for the procedure. Of course the deductible to you is $5000. The “insurance” company walks away with your premium. Sweet racket.
    Unfortunately the Australian system is going the same way. We have a “free” (paid for by income tax levy of 2.5% – just went up from 2% and no, it does NOT cover the cost) public system but you can buy private insurance to get treatment in a private hospital. That system is going the US way and the public system is groaning at the seams and is the perennial political talking point. resulting on more money being thrown at it.
    We’re not quite as broke and in debt as the USA but we are working on it!

    1. no preference for insurance companies in pricing

      A solution that fights human nature is not a solution. Give the insurance money to the patient and the entire dynamic changes. What if the patient doesn’t pay his/her bill? Right. What does that do to the dynamic. Not what you might think. Think harder.

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