Single Payer Health Care: Livin the Dream!Follow

And I'm sure you have a wealth of knowledge and experience in the field to qualify that claim, too.

Is Canada that efficient or the US that bad at bureaucratic stuff?

Honestly? It's a matter of the degree to which you mix together government funding and for-profit private enterprise. The reality is that either end of the spectrum will work and produce efficient results. Either a system that is fully controlled/run/funded via government, or one that is fully controlled/run/funded privately will be cost effective. It's when you combine them that you run into problems.


For ideological reasons, the US is generally opposed to having our government run things directly (that whole socialism thing). But we have a faction within our society that really really really wants government to run more stuff and they're often able to convince the public of the desperate need for government to provide some service for the good of the people. The result is a bastardized system where we use government to fund programs which then funnel the money into private (often for-profit) hands. It's kinda predictable what will happen.

The problem is that the left looks at systems that work in other countries where the population is much more accepting of government control over things like health care and thinks that this means it'll work just peachy in the US, where the population is most definitely *not*. The recent health care debacle is an example of what happens. The idea of helping more people have health care coverage sounds great. But then the specter of socialism sets in and pushes back against full socialized care, the left pushes the issue anyway and we end up with just a bigger and less efficient system than what we had before.

What changed with the recent health care bill? We didn't change the way we provide health care at all. It's still a collection of private health care insurers doling out care. The only thing we did was mandate that people had to buy their product and mandate what that product had to include. Is anyone actually confused about what will happen to the price of the product when you do that? There is no way that costs can or will go down. What will happen is that more people will become unable to afford to pay for health insurance, more of the burden to fund it will fall onto government, and the incentive to decrease costs will fall by the wayside even more than it already has.

The US population is simply not going to accept a fully socialized system. But as long as we have politicians who keep pushing for something like that, we're going to end up with increasingly more expensive health care. It's the culmination of 40 years of exactly that sort of half way in between health care which has gotten us into the mess we're in. Given the innate opposition to socialized health care, the solution ought to be to go in the other direction and try to get government out of the business (or at least out of the funding side of it), but it's an issue that the left just can't let go of, so we end out stuck.

Edited, May 25th 2011 4:47pm by gbaji

Given that the reason medicare exists is because of a far greater number of years where there was nothing for seniors - they had to get their insurance on the private market - I'll say no, that's a dumb idea. How many times do business have to do what business do (act in their own self-interest to generate profit) without saying that it's a bad idea to apply that principle to health care?

That's a rhetorical question, btw, we both know the answer.

You're right here, we should've left the government option in. What was so bad about the government option in the first place? It seems to be what you wanted.





Edited, May 25th 2011 7:12pm by bsphil

And yet, the insurance was less expensive and most people managed to get good care with it even before Medicare came along. The out of pocket cost for health care for seniors are about the same today with medicare as it was before medicare was passed (about 20% of their income). There's no way to calculate the effect on overall life expectancy rates due to numerous factors, but it's absolutely absurd to argue that prior to medicare seniors were just dying in the street from easily cured illnesses and could be saved if only the government stepped in.

The private market did just fine, in fact. And for those who couldn't be covered, there was a (much smaller) government program to help the truly poor and needy. All medicare did was make everyone fall into the public system. And it took a hefty chunk of change out of everyone's paycheck to do it.



Yet, amazingly, when businesses aren't co-joined at the hip with government money, they manage to consistently use their evil greed to provide better products and services at a lower cost. If only we let them do so. When you provide those businesses with a route to endless free government money, why the hell be shocked when they choose to do the least work possible to get that money?

Isn't it interesting that the areas in which the free market consistently fails to produce better goods/services for lower prices is when the government is heavily involved? There's a curve, in fact. Too little (meaning no anti-trust legislation), and businesses will tend to ***** people, but as you add more beyond that the amount of screwage and lack of cost effectiveness goes up, not down. More regulation and control isn't the answer.

When we get into the areas of business where there is very little direct government control/funding, we see consistent and massive improvements in products and services. I mean, do you think that a company that consistently failed to deliver on their promises would be able to compete in a free market? Of course they wouldn't. It's only when government steps in and make them the only game in town that things get screwy.



I suspect that is not the case at all.




You apparently have no clue what I wanted, despite me writing in great detail about it on numerous occasions in several threads.

Businesses aren't evil for pushing higher profits. That's what businesses do.

What I'm saying is that health care shouldn't be a part of that system because it leads to the people in need of health care the most not being covered or losing coverage because it's bad for business.

How much business do you think that health care providers would get if they consistently failed to pay for the health care needs of their customers? You don't think that customers would figure out that if they can never ever get more value out of their health insurance than they pay, there's no reason to buy health insurance? Of course, this was more clear cut when people purchased health care directly and could look at what they paid compared to what they get. As I've said several times, we've already taken several steps along the way which have moved us past an actual free market health care system.


No one would *ever* buy health insurance to pay for regular checkups and minor injuries if they had to pay directly. You get that, right? The whole screwed up system we have exists because the government needed more money to flow into the health care system in order to help subsidize the costs of medicare and medicaid. Go look up the HMO act of 1973 if you're unclear how this happened. That's when our system went wrong. It forced every business which provided any form of health care coverage to also provide access to an "HMO Option" (note the similarity to the proposed public option). Those HMOs pushed the health care industry into using insurance mechanisms to provide for all manner of health care, and not just the major and rare stuff which you'd normally insure.


After being the law for 20+ years, that act effectively transformed our health care system in this country from one where most people paid for most things out of pocket directly to a doctor to one in which most people have health care dollars taken out of their paychecks by their employers (often sight unseen), which then travels through a labyrinth of regulations and hands before it arrives in the form of a paycheck for an assortment of doctors and nurses, many of which may have had nothing at all to do with the care you actually received. It is based on the flawed assumption that if you just pool everyone's money together you can provide more for less. That idea simply doesn't work though. What it really does is mean that there's more interest in working the system for more money and less ability for the customer to realize it's happening.


And what did our "health care reform" do? Nothing. It left the existing system unchanged. All it did was mandate that more people had to buy into it. It's mandates and manipulation to get more people buying into a flawed system which got us into this mess in the first place! Yet, that's what our wonderful leaders came up with! Great idea... NOT!

Not if its a Dell.

Thank god you have the choice to buy from a different source, right?

I was listing things with little customer choice and typically poor customer satisfaction ratings. Your No True Scotsman rationalizations not withstanding. You didn't honestly mean to restrict it to things worse than several decades ago or else you wouldn't have mentioned health care, automobiles, etc.

I knew you'd spin out a bunch of paragraphs trying to insist that none of those counted and it was fun watching you salivate at the bell exactly as planned. Thanks :)

Edited, May 25th 2011 11:35pm by Jophiel

More bureaucracy doesn't mean a service won't work.

Germany, country of 1600 page tax bracket tables, has reasonably well working public health care, in some ways it's better than in the UK. I'd still always opt for the NHS where I can because I don't fancy filling out a 10 page form if I want elective surgery, but that's because I have the choice, before I did I filled out the forms and it was fine.