Speaking of Healthcare Reform...Follow

1. Double the number of people paying in = halve the cost per person.
2. Reduce the number of profit-makers in the chain and you reduce the nett cost proportionately.

Math > you, Mr Thicky McThick.

No, I really do believe that.

Why do you hate capitalism??

Nobby,



What's half of 0...because forcing over half the populace to assume a tax they weren't previously paying does not cut the cost per person in half.




Talk about stupid. Sorry reducing the numbers of competitors in an industry drives up cost. Thanks for playing though.

Or English.

¿Qué?

Pinche gringo...

pinche ****

Let me reply to this before going on:



You said that the generic form of Neurontin helps you. You lamented the fact that when the makers of said drug could no longer profit from it, they went on to another drug which doesn't help you. Some how, this is "bad". But the generic form of Neurontin, which does help you, would not exist if they'd not been able to profit from it in the first place. And other people will be benefited by Lyrica, who are not benefited by Neurontin. And when the generic of that comes on the market (once the patent runs out), it'll also come down in price and the company will move on to the next drug.

I assumed you were happy with this. Why wouldn't you be?



And car manufacturers don't make cars unless they think they can profit from them. Yet, despite this horrible fact, people own and drive cars and are able to travel vast distances with ease as a result. And the computer manufacturers don't make computers unless they can profit either. Yet, magically, over time, this results in better computers that cost less. Why is that a problem?

Do you think either of those drugs would have ever been made otherwise? And in a few years, when the patent runs out on Lyrica, you'll be able to afford that too. The alternative isn't free/cheap drugs. The alternative is likely that those drugs wouldn't exist at all.



Do you think that a government run health care system would direct its resources into providing for small groups of patients or large ones? They're also going to put money into treatment for the most common ailments which affect the greatest number of patients. It's about bang for the buck, and it's hardly fair to assume that profit motive is at fault for this.




Ok. But you're mixing a second issue into the mix. I don't disagree that the way the government currently doles out health care is stupid. You're preaching to the choir. But that has little or nothing to do with the benefits gained by private medical research which is largely absent in fully socialized systems.

That is just the the cost of generic drugs, since this month the past medication that up to now only was available as a brand name drug which I had to get in two different strength to equal the dose I'm on is now available in generic formula. Years ago the state use to pay nearly $1,000 a month for my medication and I had no co-pay back then. My co-pay is now $4 for non generic and $2 for generic, I'm on 7 different prescriptions durgs right now, 4 of which have to be refilled every month. If you add in the therapy and doctor visits I have each month, we're then talking well over $1,000 a month.

Talk to me again when you suddenly become chronically ill due to stress, even after exercising and eating right every day.

Believe me, if I could get a job and work even just 20 hours a week, I would take the first job offered to me, instead of having to rely on SSI and Medicaid. Even if I get a sudden windfall and go off public benefits, tomorrow, it wouldn't do me any good unless it was enough to live on the dividends only. Medical bills even with health insurance would quickly eat up any money and end me back on disability in the end.

We would also get married, if it wasn't for the cost of my medical care. It's a catch 22 that many disable and elderly find themselves in each year, when they meet someone and fall fall in love.




Then he needs to get another job making more money. Pretty f*cking simple if you asked me.

[/quote]

Why get a job he would may hate and let it eat away at his health? He thankful to be able to work at a job he loves, though it leave in in great pain at the end of the day in his left leg. One day a week he has arrange off, so he can work a second job giving tours to tourist visiting the city. He has a talent for presently history of the historical ships of Baltimore and the city's history to people of all ages and the tour company would have him doing more tours if he wanted to cut back his hours on the Historical ships. All in all, it beats working for Social Services, being a therapist and coming home stress out after listening to peoples problems all day long, or teaching a roomful of middle schoolers.

He could make more working in a warehouse then any of these jobs, but why should he take a job that would be taxing and less likely to provide health insurance.

The job only started to ofter health insurance, when they realize he was looking for another job that would offer more benefits. It's not bad work for a part time job. While the winter hours aren't great in the summer he often ends up working 40 hours a week.

Due to him, all part-time workers over the age of 21 and work 30 hours minimum a week get health, life and retirement benefits. The non profit that runs the ships, feel it a fair trade off to keep them from looking for another job. One the plus side, they often get to meet VIP's, such as the sport stars and foreign dignitaries, when they are in town. not to mention the lovely young ladies and cute little kids.

Jonwin doesn't tell he when cute guys are visiting, since they do nothing for him.

I don't know exactly how your family doctors operate now, as you didn't say anything about it, but over here they're pretty much all run as a private practice, and it seems to work pretty well. It's easy for them to get paid, and they are free to offer services not covered by the govt for payment. Interesting how in Canada I can go to any doctor I want, but in the US you're restricted by your insurance companies.

I am curious, what exactly is stopping a doctor from opening a practice and seeing patients who then pay him for a visit?

Edited, Aug 4th 2010 5:28pm by Xsarus

This, combined with you lack of basic understanding about how income tax brackets and marginal taxation works, tells me you really don't understand the first thing about business.

This isn't even a question of agreement or disagreement; you literally have no idea what Nobby was talking about here. His comment has nothing to do with competition. He isn't talking about competing companies in the same segment of the supply chain; he was talking about the number of links in the supply chain. A manufacturer has to make a profit, who usually sells to a whole seller who has to make a profit, who usually sells to a retailer who has to make a profit. Vertical integration--where companies take on different segments of the supply chain as in house responsibilities--is one of the basic ways many companies cut costs.

I'm not even asserting that vertical integration would be effective here, but I'm just surprised that someone who believes so strongly in the private sector has no idea how businesses operate on a very basic level.

Edited, Aug 4th 2010 5:48pm by Allegory

Government regulations. Out of control malpractice suits. Lack of sufficient paying patients to be able to make a living. Take your pick. Doctors are incredibly leery of operating purely private practices in the US, preferring to join a larger health care organization which provides them with legal cover, access to larger patient lists, and which can handle the massive administrative hassles involved with practicing medicine today for them. It's a combination of factors, one often lumping onto the others, but the end result is that 50 years ago all but the most major medical care needs were handled in small private practices, and today anything more serious than a headache is pushed into a system with massive overhead and cost.

Think about it. Once you get a critical mass of people into large insurance plans, you have to be a member of one of their providers to get their business as a doctor. It's self perpetuating. The HMO act was designed specifically to get that critical mass going in the first place. The system has continued rolling on ever since. The malpractice issue arose as a side effect. Once a significant portion of health care comes from doctors working as part of these massive health care organizations, the deep pockets principle sets in, and lawsuits start to get ridiculous. In that environment, purely private practitioners simply can't survive.

Ultimately, it's the working class who have been most hurt by this. If you're "poor" and qualify for medicaid, you're in the system and the government picks up the tab. If you're working somewhere that can afford the high cost of health care, you're covered and your work picks up the tab (although you're still technically paying for it anyway). But if you're in between, you're screwed. It used to be that a small practice could charge what the market could bear. Some could afford to pay full price. Some couldn't. Thus, a doctor could choose to waive some or part of his fee to a poor person to help them out, knowing that the profits from the paying customers would still allow him to be profitable. Today, everyone who can afford it gets their care through insurance, making a private practice catering to "normal" working class people almost impossible. The doctor has to be a part of a large provider, and once doing so has some contractual issue with trying to run a private practice on the side. Oddly, they can donate time to free clinics and whatnot, but *not* to small for-profit practices.


It's a system designed to cost more than it should. It's only feature is that it moves us along gradually to a socialized medical system. That's why it was implemented. It had nothing to do with making health care "better", but with actually making the private system "worse", so that at some point in the future the American public would feel that they had to accept a government run system, no matter how much they might not have wanted it initially. That's the same thing that guided the latest health care reform. It did nothing at all to reform the system. It didn't change anything. It just made insurance yet more expensive, with the idea that government would step in and foot the bill. The insurers are fine with it because they'll make more money. But it'll cost you and me more. That's the point though. Make it cost so much that a purely government system becomes a better alternative.