Health Insurance QuestionFollow

LMAO are you guys kidding me ? You are actually posting how great and wonderful govt programs are.

Can any of you please tell me 1 Government funded program that is more efficent and less wasteful than a private sector business that does the same thing?




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Your so right cat it will take liberals to run govt programs the right way......just look at the wonderfull job they have done with running things like California and Louisiana and Washington, medicare, social security, welfare programs, the war on poverty, the school system.......

Edited, Jun 29th 2009 9:58pm by ThiefX

Except that they still have to keep the business, right? They're going to provide the minimum service which wont result in their customers canceling their contracts and moving elsewhere. That's the part you kinda skipped over. The profit motive also ensures that they do enough to keep their customers.



The exact same pressures to reduce costs exist in public systems Joph. It's naive to think otherwise. The difference is that while the private company wants to maximize profits by providing the minimum service for the highest price, it has to provide sufficient service to be worth paying for. The government is under no such obligation at all. It's cost pressures are going to be purely political in origin. Everyone wants free health care. No one wants to pay higher taxes for it. You don't think this results in cost/service issues?


The one key difference is that with a purely private system, if the customer is dissatisfied, he can take his business elsewhere. He doesn't have the option of not paying the share of his taxes which are paying into a public health insurance system. The threshold at which he'll switch is much higher, meaning he'll "make do" with much lower quality service before he's willing to pay for an alternative. And the cut-off financially for those who can afford to do so is higher as well. Many people who would be able to make such choices today, will simply not be able to if there's some form of government mandated insurance system. The opportunity cost is higher, and the real total cost is as well. It'll leave most middle and working class people 'stuck' with the government provided health care, and only the wealthy with options to go elsewhere.



For me, this still just comes back to what I was talking about earlier. The resources available to provide any/all services for the people are finite. They are a function of total productivity. A system which provides access to those services (including health care) as some function of individual productivity (ie: ability to pay), while not perfect, is always going to be better than an alternative which makes that determination based on some other political pressures. Instead of people "competing" for those services with their personal dollars, they're still competing, but it's about voting blocks and lobbyists.


I just don't see how that can ever be "better". It reduces the motivation to be more productive, while increasing the apparent advantages of simply forming into large blocks of voters. It makes the people slaves to the political process, deriving benefits based not on their own personal accomplishments, but rather on which party or political platform they support. It provides motivation to political parties to keep as many people poor and needy as possible, so that those people will have to vote based on filling those needs rather than other possibly more important things.


It's just a bad thing.

I have had both private insurance and government. I have had the same doctors with both, however my payments for the government one are far FAR less.

What some people who have Tricare don't realize, is that you can see private physicians. Are there bad doctors? Well duh. But, it isn't exclusive to government care.

I don't believe that this is a black and white topic. Private insurance can function alongside government healthcare. The issue is that there are far too many people who don't qualify for state health insurance policies like medicaid yet cant afford health insurance through their jobs. (My UHC was going to go from 54 a paycheck to over 400 after I had my daughter) - those uninsured people have uninsured children and when they use the E.R. for their medical care, it's the rest of us that cover the bill.

gbaji

You know that state funding doesn't mean 1 hospital for the whole country, right?

In UK and other 21st century healthcare systems, hospitals receive funding based on volume and quality and thereby have to compete. If you're not happy with the care (or reputation) of a hospital, you go elsewhere. The incentive for improvement is huge.

Idiot.

Most of my high school teachers were:


Old enough that their kids' kids were in high school in some other city
Not Parents
Having their kids go to the school they teach at.

Considering the salary of an average high school teacher(assuming that they're about as underpaid in most places as they are in Canada), I don't see how very many could easily afford to send their kids to private schools.

Also, no matter how rich I got, my kids would still go to public schools. Private schools are expensive, and tend to turn people into conceited pricks who think they're better than everyone else. Plus, I hear a lot of them are single gender schools, which is just terrible.

On a public HS teacher's salary?

Do you know what Nobby does for a living?

Have you not heard any horror stories about people waiting for care here? Or going into massive debt or bankruptcy, because if you can't afford health insurance, you sure as **** can't afford catastrophic illness.

Drift,



I agree. Also by the time I was a senior I was taking nothing but ap honors classes so I was able to basically get away from that thug element. My whole point was that a kids shouldn't have to endure that and generally don't in private schools.

My kids went to public school. We also had a high-buck private high school nearby. I personally knew two teachers at the private school that lived in town. Both these teachers could send their kids to the private school tuition free. They both gave the kids the option. In one family the oldest boy went to the private school and the younger to the public - he was a budding musician and the public system offered up WAY more opportunity. In the other family, both boys ended up graduating from the public school and both are now in ivy league colleges.

My experience is not normal however. I choose the town to raise my kids in because of the exceptional school systems - which pretty consistently given higher ratings than any local private schools.

If parents make education a priority - they can get their kids a good education via public schools. And I truly believe its family values more than the institution that determine the success of a kids education.

We didn't have AP honors classes at our school, and even if we did, I wouldn't have been able to get into them as I have a hard time putting my knowledge and what I've found through research into writing and always ended up with marks just a few % lower than what was needed for honor roll.


Point is, I'd rather see my kids come out of a public school with both book smarts and street smarts, than come out of a private school with a whole pile of book smarts, but absolutely no street smarts.

Private schools are often smaller, and don't have the population or the demographics to offer any education that will help people doing trades. they often won't be able to offer as many AP courses. There are often way more options and choices at public schools, just because they are big enough to be able to offer them and still have full classrooms. There's nothing wrong with private schools, but they are hardly the end all and be all. In many cases they would be the wrong choice.

See, they wouldn't graduate from private schools either. You're confusing problems with causes.

How common are private schools in the states anyway? In Canada the vast majority of people went to public schools and they seem to be fine. There are fantastic programs in public high schools like the international baccalaureate, that let motivated people get absolutely fantastic education.

Edited, Jun 30th 2009 10:05am by Xsarus