DaVinci 0 #76 March 3, 2007 QuoteYes, when you are young, at the age of 19 and have no diseases, you can get a plan with 5000 deductible you'll pay $50/mo for (with no dental coverage btw). But this is the lowest price to cover only very young and healthy, which is not ever close to average. MY GF is closer to 30 than 19 and has a condition. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
DaVinci 0 #77 March 3, 2007 QuoteSocial Security has been a shining example of a government program that works quite well ?!?!?!?!?!?!?! QuoteTake off the cap and it fixes itself. For an additional 7 years...Then back to the same problems. The increase would be $541 billion in new taxes over the first five years alone. Now I know you don't care since you will not be paying it, but others do care. And that blows your little "500 dollar tax raise" theory to hell. QuoteIf a new health care plan worked as well as social security has, we'd be sitting in high cotton Really ?!?!?!!? You mean for 12 years till it was bankrupt right? Bill Clinton on SS - If you don't like privatizing Social Security, and I don't like it very much, but you want to do something to try to increase the rate of return, what are your options? Well one thing you could do is to give people one or two percent of the payroll tax, with the same options that Federal employees have with their retirement accounts; where you have three mutual funds that almost always perform as well or better than the market and a fourth option to buy government bonds, so you get the guaranteed social security return and a hundred percent safety just like you have with Social Security. From "just the facts" Time Period Financial Status 1984- 2015 The Social Security program brings in more money than it spends. The surplus money is loaned to the federal government. 2015-2037 The Social Security program spends more money than it collects in taxes. The federal government pays back the money that the Social Security program has loaned to it with interest. 2037-2075 The SS program runs annual deficits totaling 30 trillion dollars. So, it is solvent till 2015, then the GOV (Read tax payers) have to pay back loans from the SS to the GOV. Then those run out and it runs a deficit of 30 trillion dollars a year. The major reasons why there will be a problem are really simple. 1. People are having less children. Which means less have to contribute to support more. 2. People live longer. Which means they will get paid the benefit longer. So without turning this into a SS debate....The program is not sustainable and to start a national health care program along the same lines is not very smart. The only fixes? 1. Raise the taxes. 2. Lower benefits. Interesting thing...The original tax was supposed to be only 6%. That was not enough so it has been rasied about 6 times so that it is now at 12.4% http://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/crs9436.pdf To put it simpy to start another program that poorly designed and run would be stupid. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
georgerussia 0 #78 March 3, 2007 Quote MY GF is closer to 30 than 19 and has a condition. The Blue Cross rate is the same for 19-29yo.* Don't pray for me if you wanna help - just send me a check. * Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Richards 0 #79 March 3, 2007 QuoteIf the NHS systems that exist in, say, the UK or Canada have deficiencies that most Americans are unwilling to live with, fine. Rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater and refusing to even consider the concept, why not use the other countries' systems as our R & D, and develop something better? Agreed. The fact that ours is failing does not mean that it cannot work. Mind you the issues in each country will be different. One of our problems is there is systemic abuse of the system (people going to the doctor for headaches, sore muscles from working out, hangnails...etc) and an unrealistic expectation of what health care should cover (there was a huge scandal in the news that ours covers gender reassignment surgury for some silly reason). With American culture being what it is you might not see the abuse we have here in Canada and conceivably it might work. My biggest handicap is that sometimes the hole in the front of my head operates a tad bit faster than the grey matter contained within. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
georgerussia 0 #80 March 3, 2007 Quote Agreed. The fact that ours is failing does not mean that it cannot work. Mind you the issues in each country will be different. One of our problems is there is systemic abuse of the system (people going to the doctor for headaches, sore muscles from working out, hangnails...etc) It's the same in every country I lived, which had free healthcare. Usually half of people visiting the doctor should instead go home, and change something in their life, like sleep more/exercise more/eat less, as their problem is not medical. Quote and an unrealistic expectation of what health care should cover (there was a huge scandal in the news that ours covers gender reassignment surgury for some silly reason). Private health insurance inductry fraud is stated as one of the reasons for raising the insurance cost as well.* Don't pray for me if you wanna help - just send me a check. * Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites nathaniel 0 #81 March 3, 2007 Quote just streamlining the whole process. While there is in fact inefficiency in our system (and necessarily, ins anything thrown together and operated by such imperfect creatures as humans), no contemporary proposal is "just streamlining" because just streamlining is nowhere near enough to close the gap between how much money we have and the market costs of the goods we want to deliver. Economics teaches us that in any market economy, the most any one player can do is control the quantity or the price of a good (as in a monopoly or a monopsony). Every proposal on the table today that purports to advance the quantities of healthcare rendered whilst simultaneously lowering the price is fiction. Proponents of this, that or the other plan believe that there is an economy of scale in healthcare, that it's somehow like automobiles or software where most of the cost is up front in factories and development, that the healthcare system we have can be scaled and that it will function more efficiently when we do so. The difference between software / autos and healthcare is that economies of scale have been empirically validated for software/autos, but there's ample reason not to believe that equivalent scaling factors exist for healthcare, such as limited supply of doctors, nurses, organ donors, drugs, sterilized / disposable apparatus, various maintenance costs for hospital facilities, contamination & isolation requirements, and the sheer complexity of human physiology. In fact there are reasons to believe that healthcare acts simply as a traditional good, that throwing more money at healthcare will cause the prices to rise (healthcare inflation) and may change the ultimate amounts consumed only in scant proportion. Think of it this way, if that $500 NYT proposed tax were redistributed back to the taxpayers individually, so that everybody had a self-funded use-it-or-lose-it $500 medical savings account, healthcare suppliers could (and would) just jack up their prices across the board such that that $500 would not increase the resultant healthcare consumption particularly much. It'd probably introduce some inefficiency, even, because healthy people like me who consume well under $500 in healthcare per year might seek to extract some value at all from their accounts with needless scans and procedures rather than face a total loss of the account due to underuse.My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites DaVinci 0 #82 March 3, 2007 QuoteThe Blue Cross rate is the same for 19-29yo. You said young and health. She may be young, but she had a prior condition. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites georgerussia 0 #83 March 4, 2007 Quote You said young and health. She may be young, but she had a prior condition. Well, let's see what happens when she turns 30.* Don't pray for me if you wanna help - just send me a check. * Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites billvon 2,400 #84 March 4, 2007 >Every proposal on the table today that purports to advance the quantities >of healthcare rendered whilst simultaneously lowering the price is fiction. Which is why my proposal does not attempt to increase the quantities of healthcare right now. It just takes the healthcare that we ARE providing now, through a maze of insurance companies, government programs, collection agencies, state reimbursements, hospital bailouts, rural doctor incentives and lawsuits and puts it under one roof. If you eliminate half the people required to provide a given level of care, you (roughly) halve the price. Most of the money spent on healthcare today does not go to doctors or even drug companies - it goes to insurance companies, collection agencies and lawyers. That's why other countries can provide decent medical care for all their citizens for less cost. They use fewer people to do the same job, and far more of them are actual doctors. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites kallend 1,623 #85 March 4, 2007 Fix the extreme imbalance in the attached chart and you could pay for a whole lot of healthcare.... The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites nanook 1 #86 March 4, 2007 Quote>Every proposal on the table today that purports to advance the quantities >of healthcare rendered whilst simultaneously lowering the price is fiction. Which is why my proposal does not attempt to increase the quantities of healthcare right now. It just takes the healthcare that we ARE providing now, through a maze of insurance companies, government programs, collection agencies, state reimbursements, hospital bailouts, rural doctor incentives and lawsuits and puts it under one roof. If you eliminate half the people required to provide a given level of care, you (roughly) halve the price. Most of the money spent on healthcare today does not go to doctors or even drug companies - it goes to insurance companies, collection agencies and lawyers. That's why other countries can provide decent medical care for all their citizens for less cost. They use fewer people to do the same job, and far more of them are actual doctors. Another reason those other countries can provide the decent care is also because of their smallness and nearness to other countries. They don't have oceans between them. unlike us, they aren't on the opposite side of the world from the next superpower. A lot do not need the Navies or other military that we have to have. If we drew back and let those countries take equal responsibility for the world trade lanes, they definitely will not afford the healthcare. Kallend just posted a piechart that correctly tells us the amount of military spending we do relative to other, much smaller social countries. That chart tells me a complete different story though. It tells me that we are not only the second largest country on that chart, but the one country on the far side of the world. We have to at least be responsible for the protection of our merchants. Also, socializing requires a considerable amount of eminent domain claims on whole or part of a whole industry and businesses , putting up a government beaurocracy in its place, thereby increasing the govt size while decreasing its tax source._____________________________ "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites billvon 2,400 #87 March 4, 2007 >A lot do not need the Navies or other military that we have to have. I agree. But we still spend more (in taxes) on healthcare alone than most countries with socialist medicine and get less quality healthcare, at least in terms of lifespan and infant mortality rates. That's what we should be working on. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites freethefly 6 #88 March 4, 2007 QuoteI'd rather work my butt off and live in a country where everyone has access to education and good health care than work my butt off to live in a country where poor people get poor education and poor health care. Having healthier, well-educated people in our country (even if some don't work for it) would make it a better place to live IMHO. You may also find a lower crime rate in a more healthy and educated community. A plus in savings for the taxpayers as less police would be needed. Use of the health system goes down when people have a healthier community to live in. Revitalized ghetto communities by way of TIF funds have realized this. Community oriented developers have latched on to modernizing slum areas and allowing the residents to buy into ownership. Gone are the slumlords, the crack gangs and prostitutes. Healthy urban developement leads to healthy living. Conservetives do not want to believe this and want to push it off as some sort of hippy liberal pipe dream but, the numbers are in the bag. Washington Square in St. Louis is just one of those places that benefited from TIF funding. Unfortunately TIF funds have all to often been hijacked by upperclass developers and upperclass communities to add on to upscale shopping malls and neighborhoods. Would you rather spend a little more now and revitalize a ravaged community or would you rather keep throwing a fortune into a burning barrel by funding an ever increasing police force that has not put the smallest dent into the problem? Healthy people feel better about themselves and their communities. To continue to keep people poor and in poor health only adds onto a sense of ill will towards thriving communities. In turn it adds on to increased crimminal activities which all taxpayers must pay for in terms of police, prosecution and incarceration and eventually healthcare for prisoners. Give the people healthcare, education and a healthy community now and the outcome will be less of the more unfortunate outcomes by denying it."...And once you're gone, you can't come back When you're out of the blue and into the black." Neil Young Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites nathaniel 0 #89 March 4, 2007 Quote If you eliminate half the people required to provide a given level of care, you (roughly) halve the price. And you might reduce the quantities delivered by 75% or more, and unevenly throughout the country so that care can only be delivered in major population centers. There is no accounting in such a proposal, and it is plain to see that any accounting would ruin it. Quote Most of the money spent on healthcare today does not go to doctors or even drug companies - it goes to insurance companies, collection agencies and lawyers. You seem to have a negative perception of health insurance providers. Insurance providers are just companies like Dell or GE. Despite what you may think, insurers provide an actual service. It is odd that on one hand you demand insurance for everybody, then criticize the value of insurance. You can't have it both ways. Is insurance valuable and worth paying for, or not? The biggest health insurance providers have had net incomes of around a couple billion per year recently, per their annual statements and SEC filings. By contrast, Dell's net income was around $3B in 2005. Is Dell more or less evil than Wellpoint, and why? The fact is that nobody on the supply side of healthcare is out of control these days, and none of them has strong prospects for the near future. The insurers are lumbering, although they have increased profitability since the '90s they are raising prices, reducing coverage, leaking customers, shafting providers, and generally scrambling to figure out how to offer insurance inside our perverted and shifting regulatory environments. The drug companies are quitting research out of cost vs profit concerns, and the doctors are leaving in droves due to insurance costs such that many types of procedures are unavailable in entire states. Even the providers that are making money today face drastically reduced prospects over the next ten years--they're literally running up against the ability of our overally economy to support them. On the other hand, high-end, highly subsidized consumers like me are doing extremely well but most of us do not understand that our contemporary gains are baldly unsustainable. We're juicing the entire system with our regulations and subsidies, and any solution that preserves both healthcare and our economy as we know it today will necessarily cut off the flow. For as much as healthcare already costs, squeezing the providers and the infrastructure will only siphon more out of a leaky system. We must come to terms with the fact that we cannot afford all of the healthcare that we want, that we currently get and perversely feel entitled to unlimited quantities of. The market will always provide some newer, more expensive regimen that is out of reach, often impossibly so, this is human nature. It's the entrepreneurial spirit and the embodiment of market economics that makes it so--it is the manifestation of hope.My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites nathaniel 0 #90 March 4, 2007 Quote But we still spend more (in taxes) on healthcare alone than most countries We also have vastly different healthcare needs that most countries, cf our last thread on this subject and poverty.My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites TheAnvil 0 #91 March 4, 2007 Hmmm...interesting graph. Now how about a graph of projected medicare and medicaid costs over the next few years under the current health care system to go along with it? CBO projections are readily available for you to produce such a graph... Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites Richards 0 #92 March 4, 2007 QuoteIt's the same in every country I lived, which had free healthcare. Usually half of people visiting the doctor should instead go home, and change something in their life, like sleep more/exercise more/eat less, as their problem is not medical. Private health insurance inductry fraud is stated as one of the reasons for raising the insurance cost as well. This question may seem rhetorical but, how then do you reduce the abuse and stop the creeping sense of entitlement that comes with such programs. I once thought that applying user fees to doctor visits (not unlike an auto-insurance deductable) might help but people wouldn't hear of it. I had apparently committed sacrilege by even suggesting such a thing. If people could realise that like any other resource, health coverage can run dry if abused, we could perhaps manage it effectively. Unfortunately it all becomes politicized and then the lobby (special interest) groups start demanding some non-neccessities become a right. Once that happens, politicians looking to gain political favour might allow frivulous use of it, and the downward spiral starts and then dollars that should be going to critical lifesaving treatments start going to things like breast implants, liposuction, fat farm subsidization, gender re-assignment surgery..etc.. If anyone can suggest how to prevent that, I am all ears. My biggest handicap is that sometimes the hole in the front of my head operates a tad bit faster than the grey matter contained within. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nathaniel 0 #81 March 3, 2007 Quote just streamlining the whole process. While there is in fact inefficiency in our system (and necessarily, ins anything thrown together and operated by such imperfect creatures as humans), no contemporary proposal is "just streamlining" because just streamlining is nowhere near enough to close the gap between how much money we have and the market costs of the goods we want to deliver. Economics teaches us that in any market economy, the most any one player can do is control the quantity or the price of a good (as in a monopoly or a monopsony). Every proposal on the table today that purports to advance the quantities of healthcare rendered whilst simultaneously lowering the price is fiction. Proponents of this, that or the other plan believe that there is an economy of scale in healthcare, that it's somehow like automobiles or software where most of the cost is up front in factories and development, that the healthcare system we have can be scaled and that it will function more efficiently when we do so. The difference between software / autos and healthcare is that economies of scale have been empirically validated for software/autos, but there's ample reason not to believe that equivalent scaling factors exist for healthcare, such as limited supply of doctors, nurses, organ donors, drugs, sterilized / disposable apparatus, various maintenance costs for hospital facilities, contamination & isolation requirements, and the sheer complexity of human physiology. In fact there are reasons to believe that healthcare acts simply as a traditional good, that throwing more money at healthcare will cause the prices to rise (healthcare inflation) and may change the ultimate amounts consumed only in scant proportion. Think of it this way, if that $500 NYT proposed tax were redistributed back to the taxpayers individually, so that everybody had a self-funded use-it-or-lose-it $500 medical savings account, healthcare suppliers could (and would) just jack up their prices across the board such that that $500 would not increase the resultant healthcare consumption particularly much. It'd probably introduce some inefficiency, even, because healthy people like me who consume well under $500 in healthcare per year might seek to extract some value at all from their accounts with needless scans and procedures rather than face a total loss of the account due to underuse.My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
DaVinci 0 #82 March 3, 2007 QuoteThe Blue Cross rate is the same for 19-29yo. You said young and health. She may be young, but she had a prior condition. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
georgerussia 0 #83 March 4, 2007 Quote You said young and health. She may be young, but she had a prior condition. Well, let's see what happens when she turns 30.* Don't pray for me if you wanna help - just send me a check. * Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 2,400 #84 March 4, 2007 >Every proposal on the table today that purports to advance the quantities >of healthcare rendered whilst simultaneously lowering the price is fiction. Which is why my proposal does not attempt to increase the quantities of healthcare right now. It just takes the healthcare that we ARE providing now, through a maze of insurance companies, government programs, collection agencies, state reimbursements, hospital bailouts, rural doctor incentives and lawsuits and puts it under one roof. If you eliminate half the people required to provide a given level of care, you (roughly) halve the price. Most of the money spent on healthcare today does not go to doctors or even drug companies - it goes to insurance companies, collection agencies and lawyers. That's why other countries can provide decent medical care for all their citizens for less cost. They use fewer people to do the same job, and far more of them are actual doctors. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kallend 1,623 #85 March 4, 2007 Fix the extreme imbalance in the attached chart and you could pay for a whole lot of healthcare.... The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nanook 1 #86 March 4, 2007 Quote>Every proposal on the table today that purports to advance the quantities >of healthcare rendered whilst simultaneously lowering the price is fiction. Which is why my proposal does not attempt to increase the quantities of healthcare right now. It just takes the healthcare that we ARE providing now, through a maze of insurance companies, government programs, collection agencies, state reimbursements, hospital bailouts, rural doctor incentives and lawsuits and puts it under one roof. If you eliminate half the people required to provide a given level of care, you (roughly) halve the price. Most of the money spent on healthcare today does not go to doctors or even drug companies - it goes to insurance companies, collection agencies and lawyers. That's why other countries can provide decent medical care for all their citizens for less cost. They use fewer people to do the same job, and far more of them are actual doctors. Another reason those other countries can provide the decent care is also because of their smallness and nearness to other countries. They don't have oceans between them. unlike us, they aren't on the opposite side of the world from the next superpower. A lot do not need the Navies or other military that we have to have. If we drew back and let those countries take equal responsibility for the world trade lanes, they definitely will not afford the healthcare. Kallend just posted a piechart that correctly tells us the amount of military spending we do relative to other, much smaller social countries. That chart tells me a complete different story though. It tells me that we are not only the second largest country on that chart, but the one country on the far side of the world. We have to at least be responsible for the protection of our merchants. Also, socializing requires a considerable amount of eminent domain claims on whole or part of a whole industry and businesses , putting up a government beaurocracy in its place, thereby increasing the govt size while decreasing its tax source._____________________________ "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 2,400 #87 March 4, 2007 >A lot do not need the Navies or other military that we have to have. I agree. But we still spend more (in taxes) on healthcare alone than most countries with socialist medicine and get less quality healthcare, at least in terms of lifespan and infant mortality rates. That's what we should be working on. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
freethefly 6 #88 March 4, 2007 QuoteI'd rather work my butt off and live in a country where everyone has access to education and good health care than work my butt off to live in a country where poor people get poor education and poor health care. Having healthier, well-educated people in our country (even if some don't work for it) would make it a better place to live IMHO. You may also find a lower crime rate in a more healthy and educated community. A plus in savings for the taxpayers as less police would be needed. Use of the health system goes down when people have a healthier community to live in. Revitalized ghetto communities by way of TIF funds have realized this. Community oriented developers have latched on to modernizing slum areas and allowing the residents to buy into ownership. Gone are the slumlords, the crack gangs and prostitutes. Healthy urban developement leads to healthy living. Conservetives do not want to believe this and want to push it off as some sort of hippy liberal pipe dream but, the numbers are in the bag. Washington Square in St. Louis is just one of those places that benefited from TIF funding. Unfortunately TIF funds have all to often been hijacked by upperclass developers and upperclass communities to add on to upscale shopping malls and neighborhoods. Would you rather spend a little more now and revitalize a ravaged community or would you rather keep throwing a fortune into a burning barrel by funding an ever increasing police force that has not put the smallest dent into the problem? Healthy people feel better about themselves and their communities. To continue to keep people poor and in poor health only adds onto a sense of ill will towards thriving communities. In turn it adds on to increased crimminal activities which all taxpayers must pay for in terms of police, prosecution and incarceration and eventually healthcare for prisoners. Give the people healthcare, education and a healthy community now and the outcome will be less of the more unfortunate outcomes by denying it."...And once you're gone, you can't come back When you're out of the blue and into the black." Neil Young Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nathaniel 0 #89 March 4, 2007 Quote If you eliminate half the people required to provide a given level of care, you (roughly) halve the price. And you might reduce the quantities delivered by 75% or more, and unevenly throughout the country so that care can only be delivered in major population centers. There is no accounting in such a proposal, and it is plain to see that any accounting would ruin it. Quote Most of the money spent on healthcare today does not go to doctors or even drug companies - it goes to insurance companies, collection agencies and lawyers. You seem to have a negative perception of health insurance providers. Insurance providers are just companies like Dell or GE. Despite what you may think, insurers provide an actual service. It is odd that on one hand you demand insurance for everybody, then criticize the value of insurance. You can't have it both ways. Is insurance valuable and worth paying for, or not? The biggest health insurance providers have had net incomes of around a couple billion per year recently, per their annual statements and SEC filings. By contrast, Dell's net income was around $3B in 2005. Is Dell more or less evil than Wellpoint, and why? The fact is that nobody on the supply side of healthcare is out of control these days, and none of them has strong prospects for the near future. The insurers are lumbering, although they have increased profitability since the '90s they are raising prices, reducing coverage, leaking customers, shafting providers, and generally scrambling to figure out how to offer insurance inside our perverted and shifting regulatory environments. The drug companies are quitting research out of cost vs profit concerns, and the doctors are leaving in droves due to insurance costs such that many types of procedures are unavailable in entire states. Even the providers that are making money today face drastically reduced prospects over the next ten years--they're literally running up against the ability of our overally economy to support them. On the other hand, high-end, highly subsidized consumers like me are doing extremely well but most of us do not understand that our contemporary gains are baldly unsustainable. We're juicing the entire system with our regulations and subsidies, and any solution that preserves both healthcare and our economy as we know it today will necessarily cut off the flow. For as much as healthcare already costs, squeezing the providers and the infrastructure will only siphon more out of a leaky system. We must come to terms with the fact that we cannot afford all of the healthcare that we want, that we currently get and perversely feel entitled to unlimited quantities of. The market will always provide some newer, more expensive regimen that is out of reach, often impossibly so, this is human nature. It's the entrepreneurial spirit and the embodiment of market economics that makes it so--it is the manifestation of hope.My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nathaniel 0 #90 March 4, 2007 Quote But we still spend more (in taxes) on healthcare alone than most countries We also have vastly different healthcare needs that most countries, cf our last thread on this subject and poverty.My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
TheAnvil 0 #91 March 4, 2007 Hmmm...interesting graph. Now how about a graph of projected medicare and medicaid costs over the next few years under the current health care system to go along with it? CBO projections are readily available for you to produce such a graph... Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Richards 0 #92 March 4, 2007 QuoteIt's the same in every country I lived, which had free healthcare. Usually half of people visiting the doctor should instead go home, and change something in their life, like sleep more/exercise more/eat less, as their problem is not medical. Private health insurance inductry fraud is stated as one of the reasons for raising the insurance cost as well. This question may seem rhetorical but, how then do you reduce the abuse and stop the creeping sense of entitlement that comes with such programs. I once thought that applying user fees to doctor visits (not unlike an auto-insurance deductable) might help but people wouldn't hear of it. I had apparently committed sacrilege by even suggesting such a thing. If people could realise that like any other resource, health coverage can run dry if abused, we could perhaps manage it effectively. Unfortunately it all becomes politicized and then the lobby (special interest) groups start demanding some non-neccessities become a right. Once that happens, politicians looking to gain political favour might allow frivulous use of it, and the downward spiral starts and then dollars that should be going to critical lifesaving treatments start going to things like breast implants, liposuction, fat farm subsidization, gender re-assignment surgery..etc.. If anyone can suggest how to prevent that, I am all ears. My biggest handicap is that sometimes the hole in the front of my head operates a tad bit faster than the grey matter contained within. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kelpdiver 2 #93 March 4, 2007 Quote You seem to have a negative perception of health insurance providers. Insurance providers are just companies like Dell or GE. Despite what you may think, insurers provide an actual service. It is odd that on one hand you demand insurance for everybody, then criticize the value of insurance. You can't have it both ways. Is insurance valuable and worth paying for, or not? The biggest health insurance providers have had net incomes of around a couple billion per year recently, per their annual statements and SEC filings. By contrast, Dell's net income was around $3B in 2005. Is Dell more or less evil than Wellpoint, and why? The difference being, that if a dell laptop has issues under warranty, they fix it. When Sony made them a shitload of defective batteries, they recalled them. And so far as I know, they've never taken a policy of 'refuse everything the first time and make the customer appeal.; Dell is selling an actual product. Wellpoint, otoh, sells insurance and hopes to minimize the amount of it used. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kallend 1,623 #94 March 4, 2007 QuoteHmmm...interesting graph. Now how about a graph of projected medicare and medicaid costs over the next few years under the current health care system to go along with it? CBO projections are readily available for you to produce such a graph... You want such a graph? CBO projections are readily available for you to produce such a graph... Can anyone explain why the USA needs to spend more on "defense" than the next 14 countries combined?... The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 2,400 #95 March 4, 2007 >Despite what you may think, insurers provide an actual service. I agree 100%. But if you are buying a service, and company A must employ 1000 people for an hour to produce it, and company B must employ 300 people for an hour to produce it - which one will provide the service more cheaply? >and generally scrambling to figure out how to offer insurance inside >our perverted and shifting regulatory environments. Well, there you have it. When the system is set up such that healthcare involves lawyers to convince insurance companies to pay out, lawsuits for the most trivial healthcare issues, dozens of forms to be filed for every office visit - it's going to be expensive. That doesn't mean all insurance companies are evil, or that basic healthcare is intrinsically expensive. It does mean that the screwed-up system we have now is a very expensive one that does not provide great care. I would prefer to fix the system while keeping care levels the same. Once we've done that, THEN we can decide where we want to go from there. >For as much as healthcare already costs, squeezing the providers and >the infrastructure will only siphon more out of a leaky system. Agreed. Fixing the leaks should take priority. >We must come to terms with the fact that we cannot afford all of the >healthcare that we want, that we currently get and perversely feel entitled >to unlimited quantities of. Ding ding! Exactly! Which is why I am in favor of offering only minimal care under a national healthcare system. If you want more care (i.e. that MRI before your next training weekend, a nose job, a transplant) then you pay. >The market will always provide some newer, more expensive regimen >that is out of reach, often impossibly so, this is human nature. It's the >entrepreneurial spirit and the embodiment of market economics that >makes it so--it is the manifestation of hope. I agree. So you keep those regimens in the private sector, where people will pay whatever the doctors/drug companies ask. (Or they will get very very good health coverage.) Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nanook 1 #96 March 4, 2007 QuoteCan anyone explain why the USA needs to spend more on "defense" than the next 14 countries combined? -we are at war -we war every 10 years -our interests are spread out over the globe more than most countries. -protecting other countries' borders/seaways gives us secondary (and sometimes primary) economic maintenance. -we are a lot bigger_____________________________ "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nathaniel 0 #97 March 4, 2007 Quote Dell is selling an actual product. Why would anybody pay an insurance company if they weren't getting something valuable in return? Insurance is a financial product just like stocks, bonds, annuities, options etc. The main reason you don't see clearinghouses & exchanges in the US is that insurance is regulated by each state instead of by the Federal govt like stocks & bonds, and the contracts are typically a bit more customized. In other countries, like in the UK, insurance and other financial products are often sold by the same company, and generally more "securitized". This has only started recently in the US as a result of diminished regulation in the last few decades. See Lloyd's of London. Quote Wellpoint, otoh, sells insurance and hopes to minimize the amount of it used. I suspect you've never tried to return a defective Dell part. This criterion does not distinguish Dell from Wellpoint--Dell's warrantees are in fact a type of insurance. Nobody will patronize an insurance program that does not pay out fully per its terms--the payout is part of the contractual relationship. The friction involved in making a claim is simply part of what you are paying for--offer to pay more up front and you can usually buy a higher level of service. "Gold" or "platinum" service from Dell, it may not named as attractively but good service is surely for sale from any health insurer. HMO, PPO, tiers of service, it's directly analogous.My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nanook 1 #98 March 5, 2007 Sounds like the way to fix it is to reform healthcare-related lawsuits rather than a change in infrastructure. I'm more for trying the easier way first._____________________________ "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 2,400 #99 March 5, 2007 >-we are at war >-we war every 10 years That explains why we DO spend more on defense than the next 14 countries combined, but does not explain why we NEED to spend money on optional wars. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nanook 1 #100 March 5, 2007 Has there ever been a war that was not "optional"? Even the Revolutionary War and Civil Wars were optional. History has told that those wars were way more "optional" and disliked than this current one. I can't help you on the "NEED". It's a Fallacy. It's based on opinion. It can't be answered. There's no wrong answer. Present-going war rhetoric is useless until the resolution and fallout of the war has been completed._____________________________ "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
